Neurofeedback session yields short-lived mood lift in depression — SkimNews
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- Laurel Morris at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai led a randomised-controlled trial enrolling 32 people with major depressive disorder and 30 without mental health conditions, all medication-free for at least a week.
- Participants lay in a scanner measuring activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) while thinking about motivating things, with roughly half receiving genuine real-time feedback via a thermometer-like display and the rest unknowingly shown prerecorded signals as a sham group.
- People with depression who received genuine feedback scored higher on two mood questionnaires immediately after leaving the scanner and the following day compared with the sham group, with the improvement driven by reduced negative emotions like sadness rather than increased positive feelings.
- Brain activity in the VTA did not significantly differ between those who received genuine and sham feedback, prompting University of Pittsburgh's Kymberly Young to suggest that simply thinking about motivating things—rather than the neurofeedback itself—may explain the mood shift.
- Morris called the changes not yet clinically meaningful and noted that the mood improvements had disappeared by a one-week follow-up, though participants who were better at regulating their VTA reported greater mood gains.
- A follow-up trial at the University of Oxford testing two neurofeedback sessions instead of one began in September, though results aren't expected for several years.
Why it matters: For the 32 depressed participants, a single neurofeedback session produced overnight mood gains that vanished within a week—useful for refining the protocol but not yet a treatment clinicians could offer. The puzzle that the Oxford follow-up must resolve: genuine vs. sham brain activity looked identical, yet only the real-feedback group reported improved mood.
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