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Attending to Breath: Exploring How the Cues in a Virtual Environment Guide the Attention to Breath and Shape the Quality of Experience to Support Mindfulness

Mirjana Prpa, Kıvanç Tatar, Jules Françoise, Bernhard E. Riecke, T. Schiphorst, Philippe Pasquier

Conference on Designing Interactive Systems June 8, 2018 DOI: 10.1145/3196709.3196765 (opens in new tab)

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Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Qualitative study Peer reviewed
Population Study participants in an immersive virtual environment
Topics Meditation
Key findings The authors report that audio and visual cues mapped to breathing in an immersive virtual environment can elicit and foster breath awareness, and describe the mechanisms and subjective nuances of this process through micro-phenomenology interviews. They argue that a sense of agency and control plays an important role in shaping the overall quality of the experience and can inform future mindfulness-based design.

Abstract

Busy daily lives and ongoing distractions often make people feel disconnected from their bodies and experiences. Guided attention to self can alleviate this disconnect as in focused-attention meditation, in which breathing often constitutes the primary object on which to focus attention. In this context, sustained breath awareness plays a crucial role in the emergence of the meditation experience. We designed an immersive virtual environment (iVE) with a generative soundtrack that supports sustained attention on breathing by employing the users' breathing in interaction. Both sounds and visuals are directly mapped to the user's breathing patterns, thus bringing the awareness researched. We conducted micro-phenomenology interviews to unfold the process in which breath awareness can be induced and sustained in this environment. The findings revealed the mechanisms by which audio and visual cues in VR can elicit and foster breath-awareness, and unfolded the nuances of this process through subjective experiences of the study participants. Finally, the results emphasize the important role that a sense of agency and control have in shaping the overall quality of the experience. This can in turn inform the design specifications of future mindfulness-based designs focused on breath awareness.

Comparable studies

Other qualitative studies on meditation, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan... 2017 Qualitative study with mixed-methods
The Effects of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction on Nurse Stress and Burnout Nurses in a hospital system 2004 Implementation study with mixed methods
An exploratory mixed methods study of the acceptability and effectiveness of mindfulness -based cognitive therapy for patients with active depression and anxiety in primary care Primary care patients with recurrent depression or recurrent depression and anxiety 2006 Exploratory mixed methods study n = 13
A qualitative study of mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy for depression Participants in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in a mental-health context 2001 Qualitative study n = 7
Effortless awareness: using real time neurofeedback to investigate correlates of posterior cingulate cortex activity in meditators' self-report Meditators 2013 Qualitative study using grounded theory methodology

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Meditation Philosophy of mind