This two-part study investigates the effectiveness of neurofeedback training for reducing behavioral problems commonly observed in abused/neglected children, and compares its efficacy to other treatment interventions with this population. Neuro-developmental sequelae of early relationship trauma are explored as an etiological framework for understanding disturbed affect-regulation, which appears central to the behavioral and emotional difficulties commonly experienced by this pediatric population. It is suggested that neurofeedback teaches children to self-regulate brain rhythmicity mechanisms, which in turn affects global improvements in behavior and mood. The pilot study utilizes records of 20 children removed from their biological homes by Child Protective Services. Children were assessed prior to treatment using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), and again after 30 sessions of individualized, qEEG-guided neurofeedback training. A t-test analysis of pre- and post-scores was computed, and indicated significant improvements following treatment. A meta-analysis of existing literature on treatment interventions with abused/neglected children provides individual and aggregate effect sizes for 33 outcome studies with this clinical population, and contextualizes the results of the present pilot study within other empirically validated treatment modalities. Establishment of an overall effect size for treatment for this pediatric population provides a needed method of comparing research results across studies when control groups may not be ethical or feasible.

This project analyzed professionals' opinions about biofeedback and neurofeedback.

This study investigated the use of biofeedback as part of stress-management training program with head injured adults. The single cases examined were four males with head injuries of moderate severity who were in the post-acute stages of recovery. Treatment involved bi-weekly relaxation training, using EMG biofeedback in combination with deep breathing, autogenic training and/or imagery. Individual subject response to relaxation training was examined during treatment sessions, as was the frequency of stress-related symptomatology outside of sessions, and overall functional adaptation. While all subjects showed evidence of relaxation during treatment sessions, such factors as the nature of the functional disturbance and personal motivation appear to be related to the degree of carryover to the external environment.

The primary purpose of the present study is to demonstrate that acne vulgaris can be reduced by psychological treatment. A cognitive-behavioral adjunctive intervention involving biofeedback-assisted relaxation and cognitive imagery procedures for the treatment of acne vulgaris was investigated in this study with 30 patients, already receiving traditional dermatological treatment, as participants. A three-group design was used which consisted of a treatment (relaxation-imagery), a rational behavior group therapy attention-comparison, and a medical intervention control (medication and lesion extraction) group.

Boucharq and Corson (1976) found that subjects required to lower heart rate to avoid the loss of money used the strategy of attending to meaningless stimulation twice as often as subjects required to lower heart rates to obtain money, and that subjects decreasing heart rate to avoid the loss of money performed significantly better than subjects required to lower heart rate to obtain money. Seven male and seven female undergraduates participated in a study designed to test the hypothesis that visual focusing on meaningless stimulation and biofeedback would produce larger heart rate decreases than biofeedback alone. Each subject attended three baseline sessions followed by six treatment sessions in which subjects experienced either biofeedback and the meaningless stimulus, or biofeedback alone. The principal dependent measure was heart rate, although frontalis EMG, and EEG Alpha/Theta production were recorded for correlation with heart rate. The results showed that the biofeedback and meaningless stimulus group showed significantly higher heart rates on four of the six treatment sessions when compared to the biofeedback alone group, although neither group evidenced a learning curve. Correlations between heart rate and EMG, and heart rate and EEG frequencies were nonsignificant for all sessions. The findings of this study do not support Bouchard and Corson's (1976) hypothesis that subjects who learned to reduce heart rate did so by focusing attention on meaningless stimulation.

The present study trained three adult male stutterers to increase speech fluency using relaxed breathing and a-x; biofeedback. A one group time-series design with 2 treatments was used. After an initial baseline phase (A) all 3 subjects received a relaxed breathing procedure (B), followed by a combined procedure featuring relaxed breathing and EMG biofeedback (BC). Results indicated that after 8 sessions stuttering was reduced by 19.1% from baseline levels across the 3 subjects. Despite these promising results , however, methodological questions in the baseline phase make conclusions regarding a clear relationship between the variables tentative.

In recent years, behavioral approaches for the treatment of essential hypertension have received considerable research attention. Biofeedback and relaxation training have been the behavioral treatments most often used for lowering high blood pressure. The present study compared the separate use of EMG and skin temperature biofeedback in treating essential hypertension, with a combined approach utilizing both types of feedback. Twenty-one hyper- tensive subjects were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions: (a) EMG biofeedback, (b) skin temperature biofeedback, or (c) both EMG and skin temperature biofeedback. In addition, a control group consisting of patients randomly chosen from a local cardiology clinic was utilized. After an eight week treatment period, a statistically significant pretest-posttest main effect was found for treatment groups for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. However, there was no significant difference between the three treatment groups. The results did yield a significant interaction effect in comparing the treatment groups to the control group for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure reductions.

This study compares the relative efficacy of systolic and diastolic biofeedback in lowering the systolic and diastolic blood pressures of normotensives. The importance of testing these biofeedback procedures lies in assessment of their potential as blood pressure self-control techniques for the treatment of essential hypertension.

The present study investigated the effectiveness of health related feedback as a positive reinforcer of abstinence from smoking during the 11 week period following cessation. Fifty-three subjects were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (a) maintenance program plus health related feedback (MF), (b) maintenance program only (M) and, (c) discussion control (D). All groups received an aversive treatment for smoking after which the MP group received coping skills raining and several forms of health related feedback, the M group received coping skills training only, and the D group received discussion. Groups did not differ significantly in abstinence at each of the 11 weeks.

The purpose of this investigation was to separate the effects, and determine the optimal and most feasible methods, of promoting skin temperature increase in a clinical prison population. There were no significant differences among the instructional sets with respect to skin temperature increase. Skin Temperature feedback significantly delayed the time of maximum temperature increase. However, the average delay of 3.5 minutes was not considered to be clinically significant. No other significant effects were evidenced from feedback training. It was suggested that the lack of differential effects among the instructional sets and feedback training may be a characteristic of the early stages of training and that significant differences might emerge if training were continued over a greater number of sessions.The question was raised as to whether skin-temperature training had taken place during the two training sessions. The subjects may have been displaying a nonspecific "relaxation response" or habituation to the experimental situation. It may take more than two sessions before significant conditioning of the skin-temperature response occurs. Recommendations for future research were specified, including an increase in the number of training sessions and the addition of new control procedures.