Emotion regulation in schizophrenia. Neurofeedback applications as assessed by EEG and optical imaging

Objectives: Research on Schizophrenia (S) revealed abnormal electroencephalographic activity (EEG) in schizophrenic patients and anomalies in brain responsiveness, as revealed by neuroimaging measures. However, no integration of these methods is usually applied to test the emotional deficit in S. The present pilot study applied Neurofeedback (NF) technique to restore the "unbalance cortical activity" in S in response to emotional stimuli, and applied functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and EEG coregistration to analize: a) the initial (T0) anomalous prefrontal activity (main delta band); b) the NF application during a training protocol of five weeks (T1); c) the NF efficacy in term of balanced cortical activity (T2). Participants and methods: 8 patients have been randomly assigned to either control (3 patients, C), or neurofeedback group (5 patients, N). Results: The initial evidence of an unbalanced prefrontal activity within the left/right hemisphere (higher delta) was verified in T0. Nevertheless, no anomalous behavior was observed in S about the explicit evaluation about stimuli emotional valence. Conclusions: NF treatment effect in T2 was observed for N group in comparison with C group: indeed in T2 the anomalous responsiveness to emotional cues was modulated as shown by both EEG and fNIRS measures.