The self-related characteristics of Alpha neurofeedback training and its effect on self-related brain activity

Abstract

Neurofeedback training (NFT) exhibits significant enhancement on several cognitive functions and ameliorates clinical symptoms of psychiatric/neurological disorders Nowadays a professional neurofeedback and/or biofeedback society has been developed However important issues such as trainability of brain activity and underlying mechanism of NFT are still largely unknown The present study first analyzed strategies of successful responders in terms of relative alpha amplitude and total alpha duration Our results indicated a great involvement of “self” concept Thereafter the current study reanalyzed self-related adjective vocabularies in terms of emotion and frequency In addition this study created 3 data sets for the self-referential processing (SRP) and validated their reliabilities and consistencies Finally the present study performed NFT in the two groups (Alpha and Control) and assessed performance of 2 memory tasks and SRP before and after NFT Our results exhibited successful alpha responders contributing on memory enhancement accompanied by significant activation of SRP’s self-component We conclude that NFT of alpha activity enhances memory being associated with self-related neural networks

Date of Award	2018 Sept 6
Original language	English
Supervisor	Fu-Zen Shaw (Supervisor)