Trial reportPsychiatry and clinical neurosciences2024
A double-blind trial of decoded neurofeedback intervention for specific phobias.
Trial report in Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03655262 (Treating Phobia With Multivoxel Neuro-reinforcement), which is not on this map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Treating Phobia With Multivoxel Neuro-reinforcement
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enhancement of the left frontoparietal network through real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging functional connectivity-informed neurofeedback and its impact on working memory in schizophrenia: A pilot study.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2025Trial
- Peer-guided movie neurofeedback to facilitate recovery in opioid use disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Neurofeedback interventions for obsessive-compulsive and related disorders: Current evidence and future directions.Journal of psychiatric research · 2026Review
- Modulating subjective pain perception with decoded Montreal Neurological Institute-space neurofeedback: a proof-of-concept study.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Broadening the scope: Multiple functional connectivity networks underlying threat conditioning and extinction.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
aimA new closed-loop functional magnetic resonance imaging method called multivoxel neuroreinforcement has the potential to alleviate the subjective aversiveness of exposure-based interventions by directly inducing phobic representations in the brain, outside of conscious awareness. The current study seeks to test this method as an intervention for specific phobia.
methodsIn a randomized, double-blind, controlled single-university trial, individuals diagnosed with at least two (one target, one control) animal subtype-specific phobias were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to receive one, three, or five sessions of multivoxel neuroreinforcement in which they were rewarded for implicit activation of a target animal representation. Amygdala response to phobic stimuli was assessed by study staff blind to target and control animal assignments. Pretreatment to posttreatment differences were analyzed with a two-way repeated-measures anova.
resultsA total of 23 participants (69.6% female) were randomized to receive one (n = 8), three (n = 7), or five (n = 7) sessions of multivoxel neuroreinforcement. Eighteen (n = 6 each group) participants were analyzed for our primary outcome. After neuroreinforcement, we observed an interaction indicating a significant decrease in amygdala response for the target phobia but not the control phobia. No adverse events or dropouts were reported as a result of the intervention.
conclusionResults suggest that multivoxel neuroreinforcement can specifically reduce threat signatures in specific phobia. Consequently, this intervention may complement conventional psychotherapy approaches with a nondistressing experience for patients seeking treatment. This trial sets the stage for a larger randomized clinical trial to replicate these results and examine the effects on real-life exposure. CLINICAL
trial registrationThe now-closed trial was prospectively registered at ClinicalTrials.gov with ID NCT03655262.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.