bioRxiv Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2024.11.28.625818

Enhanced Brain-Heart Connectivity as a Precursor of Reduced State Anxiety After Therapeutic Virtual Reality Immersion

Sezer, I.·Moreau, P.·El Sayed Hussein Jomaa, M.·Godefroy, V.·Batrancourt, B.·Levy, R.·Filipchuk, A.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

State anxiety involves transient feelings of tension and nervousness in response to threats, which can escalate into anxiety disorders if persistent. Despite treatments, 30%-50% of individuals show limited improvement, and neurophysiological mechanisms of treatment responsiveness remain unclear, requiring the development of objective biomarkers. In this study, we monitored multimodal electrophysiological parameters: heart rate variability (high-frequency, low-frequency, LF/HF ratio), EEG beta and alpha relative power, and brain-to-heart connectivity in participants with real-life state anxiety. Participants underwent a therapeutic intervention combining virtual-reality immersion, hypnotic script, and a breath control exercise. Real-life state anxiety was captured using the STAI-Y1 scale before and after the intervention. We observed reduced anxiety immediately after the intervention in 16 out of 27 participants. While all participants, independently of their STAI-Y1 score, showed increased HRV low frequency power, only treatment-responders displayed increased overall autonomic tone (high and low frequency HRV), increased midline beta power and brain-to-heart connectivity. Notably, the LF/HF ratio showed a significant linear relationship with anxiety reduction, with higher ratios linked to greater therapeutic response. These findings suggest that increased cognitive regulation of brain-to-heart connectivity could serve as a biomarker for therapeutic efficacy, with elevated midline beta power facilitating improved cardiac tone in responders. Significance StatementElevated state anxiety can escalate into debilitating disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, yet treatment efficacy remains inconsistent, and reliable biomarkers predicting therapeutic outcomes are lacking. This study identifies key neural and physiological markers linked to effective anxiety reduction following a virtual reality-based non-pharmacological intervention in healthy participants with increased state anxiety. Anxiety reduction is associated with increased midline beta power, heightened heart rate variability (LF/HF ratio), and enhanced brain-to-heart connectivity. These findings highlight the role of brain-to-heart modulation and autonomic nervous system functioning in therapeutic response. By highlighting these biomarkers, this research aims at advancing our understanding of anxiety treatment mechanisms and offering insights into the development of biomarker-driven, scalable interventions.

Source connections

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Sezer, I., Moreau, P., El Sayed Hussein Jomaa, M., Godefroy, V., Batrancourt, B., Levy, R., Filipchuk, A.. 2024-11-30. Enhanced Brain-Heart Connectivity as a Precursor of Reduced State Anxiety After Therapeutic Virtual Reality Immersion. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.28.625818

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Same Movements, Different Skills: How Context Shapes Learning in Humans and Neural Networks

What determines whether experiences are integrated into shared representations or split? Motor skill learning offers a revealing test: when two tasks require an identical sequence of movements, both intuition and theory suggest that practice in one should generalize to the other. Yet we find that changing context can make identical movements different skills. In simple recurrent networks trained on the same sequence across contexts, splitting was greatest when strong contextual inputs coincided with a high initial weight scale; neither alone sufficed. Greater representational separation coincided with separate context-specific learning curves. Humans practicing the same finger sequence while alternating between two performance-irrelevant contexts likewise exhibited context-specific curves, rather than the single continuous trajectory observed when practicing in a single context. State-space modeling favored split learning states in humans and very weakly coupled states in the most context-dependent networks. These findings have broader implications for understanding how learning generalizes across contexts.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Postpartum resource scarcity reshapes maternal care, offspring prioritization, and the steroid-sensitive medial preoptic area

Parental care requires balancing offspring needs with environmental constraints, yet how resource scarcity alters the organization of maternal responses remains poorly understood. Here, we examined maternal behavior, offspring prioritization, and steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix organization in postpartum rats exposed to limited bedding and nesting (LBN) or control conditions with ample nesting materials. LBN increased pup-directed and reduced self-directed behaviors but also increased behavioral entropy, a measure of behavioral fragmentation, indicating less predictable caregiving sequences. LBN dams preferentially retrieved male pups first, whereas control dams preferentially retrieved females first. LBN also increased the proportion of pup-investigation time directed toward males compared with controls. In offspring on postnatal day 10, corticosterone was elevated in female but not male LBN pups, a pattern that paralleled the maternal male bias. To identify associated neurobiological changes, we assessed steroid receptors and extracellular matrix organization in the medial preoptic area (mPOA), a key region for maternal behavior. LBN increased numbers of estrogen receptor (ER)- and androgen receptor (AR)-immunoreactive cells, reduced perineuronal net (PNN) abundance, and decreased receptor-positive cell enwrapment. Because PNNs constrain structural plasticity, these findings suggest that the postpartum environment alters the organization of steroid receptor-associated extracellular matrix, potentially modulating experience-dependent plasticity in neurosteroid-sensitive circuits. In sum, LBN increases the levels of maternal engagement while reshaping its temporal organization and allocation, accompanied by selective remodeling of steroid-sensitive preoptic architecture. Therefore, maternal adaptation to adversity may be better understood as changes in caregiving allocation strategies rather than a simple gain or loss of maternal care.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

The Computational Grammar of Human Behaviour in a Biological Environment

Human behaviour unfolds as an extended stream of spontaneous actions shaped by environmental demands and the agent's goals. The organisation of these actions, situated between setting abstract goals and concrete movement execution, remains poorly characterised. Here, we introduce DynaClade, an unsupervised temporal action segmentation algorithm for human full-body motion capture data, and apply it to freely moving participants navigating ecologically realistic risky foraging environments in virtual reality. DynaClade identifies discrete actions whose kinematic characteristics and spatial distributions correspond to environmental affordances, supporting the validity of the approach. Among these actions, we discovered a hitherto undescribed movement pattern defined by increased body sway without locomotion. Action sequences were highly non-random and showed clear history dependence beyond first-order Markov structure, most of which was explained by a second-order prediction. This higher-order structure was well captured in a hidden Markov model, in which some of the observed actions were associated with more than one latent state. Each of these latent states corresponded to the same action in a distinct action context. These findings suggest that spontaneous human actions are predominantly selected based on the current action and context, rather than following pre-planned or habitually assembled sequences.

neuroscience↗