The layout of a control task run.
anxiety
SECONDARY, BLIND
Participants were instructed to allow themselves to experience the anxiety induced by the scripts during the symptom provocation period (cued by a red diamond sign on the screen). Following provocation, they used mental strategies acquired from the strategy development session to decrease the amygdala activity (downregulation period cued by the blue arrow).CAPS-5 data were collected during screening, 30 days post-NF and 60 days post-NF by clinical psychologists who were blind to the group allocation of the participants. Change over time in CAPS-5 score was the secondary outcome measurement. The last timepoint provides an opportunity to sample slowly developing improvements in symptoms as we have previously discovered in neurofeedback studies that clinical benefits can be slow to unfold following training [Our secondary outcome measurements also included changes in amygdala resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). This data was collected pre-NF, post-NF, and 30 days post-NF preceding the control task runs. For each timepoint, two back-to-back five-minute resting-state runs were collected in which the participants were presented with a fixation on the screen and instructed to rest and keep their eyes open. The resting-state data were preprocessed in BioImage Suite in a similar pipeline as the GLM data. Amygdala connectivity was computed using individual ROIs defined from the localizer data. A mixed-design model testing for main effects of group and time, and group-by-time interaction, was computed with MRM toolbox [