Effect of biofeedback-assisted relaxation therapy on the psychophysiological measures of stressed-out working professional mothers

This study was designed to determine the effectiveness of biofeedback-assisted relaxation therapy on reducing psychophysiological stress levels of working professional mothers. Participants were 14 working professional mothers from a major daily newspaper. Reported stress levels were measured with the 123 question Stress Profile (Nowack, 1990) three times during the eight week treatment study that was held at the women's workplace. A repeated measure ANOVA design was used to analyze the data and a partial eta squared (n2) was used to calculate effect size. As hypothesized, the study found a statistically significant reduction of reported stress levels (F=8.62; p=.001) and a statistically significant (F=3.65; p=.01) reduction in measured muscle tension across subjects. A large effect size was found for reduction in reported stress levels (n2=.39) and reduction in muscle tension (n2=.21).