Using electronic diaries to examine the effect of a neurofeedback intervention

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Apr 2016
Duration in months:

36
Funding:

FNR
Principal Investigator(s):

Philip SANTANGELO

About

Emotion dysregulation is a central feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Functional magnetic resonance imaging can be used to implement neurofeedback-based training in emotion regulation. The investigation of the effects of such an intervention is ideally conducted in patients’ everyday lives, i.e. the context, in which the symptoms actually occur. Electronic diaries are ideally suited, as they enable the examination of subjective and objective indices of emotion dysregulation. Thus, we used electronic diaries in this pilot intervention study to examine the effects of the neurofeedback training. Before and after a neurofeedback intervention, 24 patients with BPD carried an electronic diary over four consecutive days with 12 prompts in hourly intervals each. Patients were asked to answer 5 items regarding negative affect and 5 regarding positive affect (thus, a subjective assessment), while the response times for answering the emotion items were recorded. Both response time and momentary intra-class coefficients were used as two objective measures of emotional clarity. We conducted pre-post comparisons of the subjective and objective indices of emotional dysregulation using multilevel models. Both with regard to the subjective (self-assessment of the ability to control one’s own emotions) and objective (reaction time and momentary intra-class coefficients) measures of emotional clarity, results show a significant increase in emotional clarity after the neurofeedback intervention compared to before, indicating an effect of the intervention.