Kun je stress leren reguleren door gebruik te maken van biofeedback in een VR omgeving? In dit vers van de pers artikel laten de auteurs ons zien wat er allemaal bij komt kijken om zoiets voor elkaar te krijgen. En daar komt heel veel (techniek) bij kijken. Los van de technische aspecten staan er veel mooie onderwerpen in dit artikel:
- De vele afwegingen om biofeedback effectief te maken in een VR omgeving
- Het effect van acute fysiologische stress op motoriek, cognitie en perceptie
- Een leerzame uitleg over wat biofeedback is
- De koppeling van biofeedback in een VR omgeving
Leerzame citaten uit het artikel (1)
Wat doet acute stress?
“Acute physiological stress impairs performance by causing deficits in motor control, cognition, or perception (Nieuwenhuys et al., 2009; Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, 2010; Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016) and can negatively impact mental health in the long term (Maguen et al., 2009). By teaching acute stress regulation, biofeedback could help preserve performance in challenging situations, and lessen the detrimental impact of repeated stress responses (Andersen and Gustafsberg, 2016)”.
Wat is biofeedback?
“People are usually not conscious of their autonomic physiology, let alone able to regulate it (Price and Hooven, 2018). Biofeedback reveals internal physiological processes and provides guidance on how to change them, which can reduce anxiety and facilitate coping with stress (Yu et al., 2018; Tolin et al., 2020)”.
Wat is stress-exposure biofeedback.
“In contrast, we provide police with the opportunity to recognize and regulate their physiological stress response while they carry out a demanding task in a stressful environment. Specifically, we provide an environment that requires the user to regulate their breathing while making fast decisions based on ambiguous, constantly changing information. We will refer to this kind of biofeedback as stress-exposure biofeedback”.
Wat kan ademhaling doen?
“This is why we chose breathing rate as our biofeedback parameter, with a biofeedback target of 4 to 12 breaths per minute (Russo et al., 2017), which is considerably lower than human breathing rates under cognitive or physical load (Nicolò et al., 2017; Hidalgo-Muñoz et al., 2019). Slow breathing affects the autonomic nervous system by increasing vagus nerve activity and evoking a shift toward parasympathetic dominance (Russo et al., 2017). This might help regulate physiological arousal in an emotionally or cognitively challenging situation.”
Vermijden van te eenvoudige schiet situaties
“In collaboration with our advisors at the Dutch police, we made an effort to steer clear of the “shoot ‘em up” genre of video games (i.e., reflexive shooting at uniformly hostile adversaries) by designed the shooting task such that the player is primed to make, careful, deliberate shooting decisions. Additionally, the task engages behaviors that are universally relevant to police: The trainee has to rely on good situational awareness, be constantly vigilant to changes in information, and be able to override response biases by flexibly incorporating these changes in their decisions (Di Nota and Huhta, 2019).”
Bron
- Brammer JC, van Peer JM, Michela A, van Rooij MMJW, Oostenveld R, Klumpers F, Dorrestijn W, Granic I and Roelofs K (2021) Breathing Biofeedback for Police Officers in a Stressful Virtual Environment: Challenges and Opportunities. Front. Psychol. 12:586553.