Could Your Breathing Be Distorting Your Marriage? New Neuroscience Explained (opens in new tab)

Here is an odd thing. Slowing the breath can, under some conditions, improve your sensitivity to ambiguous emotional faces during inhalation—and impair it during exhalation. Your lungs, apparently, may have opinions. That, at least, is one way of reading a fascinating recent paper by Shen-Mou Hsu and Chih-Hsin Tseng published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, which examined how slow-paced breathing alters perceptual sensitivity to facial expressions. And before anyone in the wellness-i...