Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 31, 2026
Combining Behavior and EEG to Study the Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Episodic Memory
Published on: May 11, 2020
Assessing effects of vibroacoustic stimulation compared to a guided mindfulness meditation using the biosignal of
Charlotte Fooks1, Oliver Niebuhr1
1Centre for Industrial Electronics, University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg, Denmark.
Introduction:
High stress and low wellbeing pose severe individual, societal and economic threats, and there is a pressing demand for non-invasive stress reduction tools. This exploratory pilot study assessed the efficacy of speech prosody as a biosignal for stress elicitation, when comparing relaxation outcomes of two interventions with a control group.
Method:
Thirty participants were divided into three treatment groups; (1) guided mindfulness meditation (2) vibroacoustic intervention (3) control. All participants read aloud a text before and after one 20-min treatment. The sixty readings were assessed using a multi-parametric acoustic-prosodic analysis, and within-speaker differences were compared between the initial and final reading.
Results:
Results show groups (1) and (2) spoke with a breathier vocal quality in the second reading, while group (3) speech was tenser and at a lower, less variable loudness.
Discussion:
Results demonstrate speech prosody is a sensitive biomarker for treatment-effect classification and evaluation. Practical limitations and future research perspectives are discussed.
