It's About Time—Breathing Dynamics Modulate Emotion and Cognition

The breathing rate, phase, and amplitude have been shown to track changes in emotional states such as anxiety and cognitive performance in tasks that involve perception, attention, and short-term memory. It is common practice to characterize breathing by using a block average breathing rate, phase, or amplitude. While these features are useful for measuring the central tendencies of breathing, they do not capture the structure of the patterns of change in its activity over time (i.e., breathing dynamics) whose relationship with affective and cognitive processes remains unclear. To fill this knowledge gap, we characterized breathing dynamics by a set of measures that capture the breathing signal's rate and amplitude central tendency, variability, complexity, entropy, and timescales. Then, we conducted a principal components analysis and demonstrated that these metrics capture similar, yet distinct features of the breathing rate and amplitude time series. Next, we showed that breathing dynamics change across rest and task conditions, suggesting they may be sensitive to changes in behavioral states. Finally, using multivariate analyses, we demonstrated that breathing complexity and entropy in the resting state are strongly and positively correlated with anxiety levels, while breathing variability in the task state is strongly and negatively associated with working memory performance. Our findings extend the current understanding of how breathing is associated with affective and cognitive processes by highlighting the key role of dynamics in that relationship.