Training Mental Simulation as a Tool for Voluntary Regulation of Physiological Arousal

People can change their bodily state by imagining events, and some autonomic measurescan be trained with biofeedback or contemplative practice. It is unknown whether deliberatelyconstructed mental simulation, taught as a skill, can be trained to move a physiologicalmeasure up, hold it, and bring it down, and whether any gain depends on real-time feedback.This manuscript proposes a four-arm randomized, assessor-blinded experiment thatseparates simulation training from true biofeedback, sham (yoked) feedback, and an activecontrol. The primary outcome is a preregistered bidirectional regulation index based on skinconductance, tested without feedback after six weeks and again four weeks later.Respiration, muscle activity, and the strategies participants actually use are recorded so thatbreathing, tension, and mental arithmetic can be ruled out as alternative explanations. Thestudy can fail in several specified ways, and each failure would be informative.