Coordination of Breathing between Ribcage and Abdomen in Emotional Arousal

Summary

This chapter discusses research of breathing patterns, especially coordination of the ribcage and the abdomen in conditions where a subject goes through a task that arouses in him/her negative or positive emotional states. The tasks that arouse negative emotional states were a mental arithmetic task and a reaction time task or to watch a videotaped scene. Two levels of materials were prepared for each of the tasks that were different in difficulty or stressfulness. In addition, the task which arouses positive emotional states was a muscle relaxation technique. These studies used as the measurement of the coordination, the relative phase between breathing movements of the ribcage and the abdomen. These results demonstrated that the fluctuations of the relative phase significantly increased from the pre-baseline period to the difficult or stressful task execution period. This showed that coordination of the ribcage and the abdomen deteriorated during stressful situations. On the other hand, the results of the experiment showed that coordination of the ribcage and the abdomen improved in a relaxed condition. The fluctuations that were found in these experiments, from the perspective of James’ emotional theory, are discussed. These studies suggest that a perspective of dynamical systems is effective in studying emotion.