NCT07364084

Real-time Neurofeedback Training of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Based on Imagined Social Support

Self-modulation of the mPFC Using Rt-fMRI NF Training to Improve Negative Anticipation for Future Events

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 60 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 35 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Randomized active-sham controlled between-subject real-time fMRI neurofeedback trial aiming to modulate activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to improve subjective negative anticipation.

Detailed description

A double-blinded, placebo-controlled, between-subject design will be employed in this study. In a randomized order, a total of 60 healthy subjects will be recruited and assigned to the experimental group (EG; N=30), which receives real feedback from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), or the sham control group (CG; N=30) which receives sham feedback from an unrelated brain region. Neurofeedback training consists of 1 baseline session without feedback (also as a localizer task), 4 training sessions with intermittent feedback and 1 transfer session without feedback. Each NF run includes 5 regulation blocks and 5 baseline blocks. Each trial starts with a jittered fixation cross (2\~8 s), a modulation block (i.e. regulation or baseline; 30 s) without continous feedback, and a intermittent feedback period (4s) to display the mean activiation of the mPFC/control region during the regulation block compared with baseline block. Objectives are to determine (1) if subjects in the neurofeedback (NF) group can gain volitional control over the mPFC activation using imagined social support as regulation strategy, (2) whether successful increased modulation of the mPFC could improve negative anticipation and sense of control for future events .

Conditions

• Healthy
• Neurofeedback

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
PROCEDURE	real-time fMRI sham-controlled neurofeedback training procedure	real-time fMRI neurofeedback training procedure running on the Turbo Brain voyager (TBV) 4.2 software (Brain Innovation, Maastricht, The Netherlands)

Timeline

• Start date: 2026-01-16
• Primary completion: 2026-06-10
• Completion: 2026-07-30
• First posted: 2026-01-23
• Last updated: 2026-01-28

Locations

1 site across 1 country: China