NCT05936684

Breathing and Decision-Making

Breathing and Decision-Making: an FMRI Study Investigating the Link Between Slow Breathing and Risky Decision-Making

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 53 (actual)
• Sponsor: German Institute of Human Nutrition · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 40 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The study aims to investigate how slow breathing with prolonged exhalation (i.e., ProlEx breathing) modulates decision-making under risk in healthy participants. To do this, a short-term breathing intervention is combined with a decision-making paradigm while neural, physiological, and behavioral data are recorded.

Detailed description

This interventional study investigates the modulatory effect of slow breathing with prolonged exhalation (i.e., ProlEx breathing) on decision-making under risk. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers seek to identify brain regions influenced by the breathing intervention during the decision-making task. Sixty healthy participants will be invited to perform ProlEx breathing during a risky decision-making task. After initial preparations, each individual's spontaneous breathing rhythm will be determined (i.e., Eupnea, control condition). This step is to i) ensure a natural breathing pace for each participant and ii) incorporate cue-assisted breathing into the control condition to allow comparability across conditions. To further investigate the effect of ProlEx on sympathovagal tone, physiological measures of respiration, electrocardiogram, pulse, electrodermal activity, and pupil are acquired. During scanning, the participant will perform a decision-making task based on the paradigm by Tom et al. (2007). The breathing intervention is applied simultaneously with continuous cue-assisted breathing for both conditions (Eupnea, ProlEx) throughout the duration of the task. The experiment follows a block design with counterbalanced orders to control for confounding effects. After completion of the scans, the participants fill out additional questionnaires.

Conditions

• Quality of Life
• Behavior
• Stress, Psychological

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Breathing with prolonged exhalation (ProlEx) during risky decision-making	20 min divided in 3 blocks of slow, 0.1 Hz breathing (6 cycles per minute) with an inhalation-to-exhalation ratio of 2:8. Cue-assisted breathing (same across participants) and performance of a risky decision-making task (Tom et al., 2007) in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner with simultaneous acquisition of physiological and pupil data.
BEHAVIORAL	Normal breathing (Eupnea/Control) during risky decision-making	20 min divided in 3 blocks of normal breathing (expected range: 0.16-0.33 Hz, i.e., 10-20 per min), Cue-assisted breathing (individually adapted) and performance of a risky decision-making task (Tom et al., 2007) in the MRI scanner with simultaneous acquisition of physiological and pupil data.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-07-04
• Primary completion: 2024-09-25
• Completion: 2024-09-25
• First posted: 2023-07-10
• Last updated: 2025-01-09

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Germany