Does Online Biofeedback Increase the Use of Stress Coping in Undergraduate Students?

Abstract

Students are under a lot of stress in their daily lives and often do not use effective coping strategies to mitigate this stress. Common coping barriers students report are lack of knowledge, lack of time, forgetting, and lack of motivation. People with a fixed anxiety mindset believe they cannot change their level of anxiety, which may relate to lack of motivation to cope.  As such, in this experiment, we investigate different interventions and personal characteristics to determine which factors increase the likelihood that students will start to use effective coping strategies more throughout the semester. To address time barriers, we chose two quick coping strategies (i.e., deep breathing and cognitive reappraisal). To address lack of knowledge, we used an education intervention (i.e., videos). To address forgetting, we used a biofeedback intervention (i.e., heart rate). All participants answered questionnaires about stress, personality, and mindset. All intervention groups underwent two stress tasks and were instructed to use the coping technique they learned during the stress tasks. We hypothesized that participants in the biofeedback groups would use the coping techniques more often than participants in the education groups, who would use the coping techniques more often than participants in the control group. We further hypothesized that participants with higher growth mindset about anxiety would use the coping techniques more in the future. Our results showed that the use of deep breathing decreased between Part 1 and 2 but more people used cognitive reappraisal regardless of intervention group.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michele Moscicki