Volitional Breathing Alerts Brain for Faster Reaction in Emotionally Distracted Working Memory Task

1115 

Abstract Submission 

Seulgi Eun¹, Phan Nguyen¹, Kyungmo Park¹

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, South Korea

Seulgi Eun  
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University
Yongin, South Korea

Phan Nguyen  
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University
Yongin, South Korea

Kyungmo Park  
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University
Yongin, South Korea

Emotion, as a comprehensive psychophysiological response to internal or external environment, plays a crucial role in survival mechanisms. Emotion sometimes enhances our cognitive function, while it often disturbs even it leads to failure [Dolcos, 2011]. When it comes to the detrimental effect of emotion is somewhat retrogressive response to survival, investigating strategy to reduce the effect could be an attractive research topic. Here, considering neurobehavioral association between breathing and emotion, which the volitional breathing (VB) could rebalance and regulate emotional states [Ashhad, 2022], we applied simple breathing strategy (i.e., slow and deep breathing) to emotionally distracted working memory task to investigate brain mechanisms of VB in emotional processing.

Twenty-eight healthy young females participated in our fMRI experiment. Participants performed three different delayed match to sample working memory (WM) tasks depending on types of breathing strategy and visual distraction during memory maintenance phase (Maintenance) (i.e., scrambled image distraction for control, Scram; negative emotional image, Emo; and volitional breathing with emotional image, EmoVB) (Fig 1A). In EmoVB, participants were instructed to breathe deep and slow, while they were given instruction to concentrate on performing WM task without any instruction on breathing in Scram and Emo. Acquired functional images for each task were preprocessed and used in the ROI-based GLM analysis. ROIs were chosen from Human Brainconnetome Atlas [Fan, 2016], and we extracted representative ROI time series within each ROI by calculating 1st principal component of principal component analysis. Then, considering brain regional heterogeneity of hemodynamic response function (HRF) [Bright, 2009], we calculated optimal HRF delays for each ROI using ROI-based GLM with time shifted stimulus HRFs (Fig 1B). Finally, we extracted ROI brain responses including BOLD activity (beta) and latency (optimal delay), and those of Maintenance were compared between Scram and Emo to investigate effect of emotional arousal, and between Emo and EmoVB to investigate effect of VB on the emotional processing. During experiment, we also measured breathing patterns and WM performance (i.e., accuracy, AC; and reaction time, RT).

As we instructed, participants' breathing pattern showed deeper in breathing depth and slower in rate in EmoVB than Emo. We found that the Emo impaired RT but not AC compared to Scram. Interestingly, VB restored the impaired RT to almost the same level of Scram, but it did not change in AC. As results of contrasted brain responses between Emo and Scram, the Emo decreased activity in the motor control and cognitive processing regions, and increased in the emotional processing regions, while it simultaneously prolonged latency in the emotional processing regions and shortened in the motor control regions. Also, our correlation analysis between brain responses and WM performance showed brain responses related to coping mechanisms both in the cognitive (i.e., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and emotional processing (i.e., parahippocampal gyrus and visual cortex) regions as well as to detrimental mechanisms in the emotional processing (i.e., amygdala) region. On the other hand, from results of brain contrast between EmoVB and Emo, the VB decreased activity in the motor control as well as in the emotional processing regions, and shortened latency in most of brain regions. Interestingly, the improved RT by the VB was associated with the decreased activity and shortened latency in the motor control regions, and more consistent breathing of the VB caused more improvement in the RT (Fig 2).

Collectively from our results, it seems that the VB not only regulates the excessive brain responses in the emotional processing network induced by the emotional distraction but also makes brain in alert state for faster response by recruiting motor control networks.

Self Processes ²

Executive Function, Cognitive Control and Decision Making

Working Memory ¹

Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI)

BOLD fMRI

Cognition

FUNCTIONAL MRI

Memory

Motor

NORMAL HUMAN

Other - Breathing