Increasing Value and Reducing Waste of Research on Neurofeedback Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A State-of-the-Art-Review.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often considered challenging to treat due to factors that contribute to its complexity. In the last decade, more attention has been paid to non-pharmacological or non-psychological therapies for PTSD, including neurofeedback (NFB). NFB is a promising non-invasive technique targeting specific brainwave patterns associated with psychiatric symptomatology. By learning to regulate brain activity in a closed-loop paradigm, individuals can improve their functionality while reducing symptom severity. However, owing to its lax regulation and heterogeneous legal status across different countries, the degree to which it has scientific support as a psychiatric treatment remains controversial. In this state-of-the-art review, we searched PubMed, Cochrane Central, Web of Science, Scopus, and MEDLINE and identified meta-analyses and systematic reviews exploring the efficacy of NFB for PTSD. We included seven systematic reviews, out of which three included meta-analyses (32 studies and 669 participants) that targeted NFB as an intervention while addressing a single condition-PTSD. We used the MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) 2 and the criteria described by Cristea and Naudet (Behav Res Therapy 123:103479, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2019.103479 ) to identify sources of research waste and increasing value in biomedical research. The seven assessed reviews had an overall extremely poor quality score (5 critically low, one low, one moderate, and none high) and multiple sources of waste while opening opportunities for increasing value in the NFB literature. Our research shows that it remains unclear whether NFB training is significantly beneficial in treating PTSD. The quality of the investigated literature is low and maintains a persistent uncertainty over numerous points, which are highly important for deciding whether an intervention has clinical efficacy. Just as importantly, none of the reviews we appraised explored the statistical power, referred to open data of the included studies, or adjusted their pooled effect sizes for publication bias and risk of bias. Based on the obtained results, we identified some recurrent sources of waste (such as a lack of research decisions based on sound questions or using an appropriate methodology in a fully transparent, unbiased, and useable manner) and proposed some directions for increasing value (homogeneity and consensus) in designing and reporting research on NFB interventions in PTSD.

Socio-cognitive correlates of primary school children's deceptive behavior toward peers in competitive settings.

Competing for limited resources with peers is common among children from an early age, illustrating their propensity to use deceptive strategies to win. We focused on how primary school-age (6-8 years old) children's strategic deception toward peers is associated with their socio-cognitive development (theory of mind and executive functions). In a novel computerized competitive hide-and-seek game, we manipulated the peer opponents' familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and actions (following vs. not following children's indications), as well as the stimuli likability (liked vs. disliked cards). Our findings demonstrated that children deceived the familiar opponent less than the unfamiliar one, indicating their determination to preserve positive peer interactions. We showed that theory of mind and executive functions significantly predicted children's willingness to deceive. Notably, second-order false belief understanding and visuospatial working memory positively predicted children's use of truths to deceive, whereas inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility efficacy scores were negatively related to their deceptive performance when using the same strategy. Implications for children's competitive behavior toward peers involving lie-telling are discussed.

Give and take: A microgenetic study of preschoolers' deceptive and prosocial behavior in relation to their socio-cognitive development.

Early on, young children begin to learn the social skills which will help them navigate through an increasingly complex social world. We explored how deceiving for personal gain potentially interacts with sharing the resulting resources and how they both relate to theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 92, 43 girls). Children played a hide-and-seek zero-sum game in which they could win stickers if they discovered how to deceive the experimenter. Then they were prompted to share their stickers in a dictator game paradigm. Using a microgenetic design, we tracked deceptive behavior across ten sessions and sharing behavior across five of these sessions, plus a follow-up session 15 months later. Children polarized into a group who never deceived across all sessions, and a group who constantly deceived above chance levels (around 85 % of the time). Sharing behavior was extremely low (under 6 % of stickers) across the sessions. At follow-up, deceptive behavior was above 80 %, while sharing remained at a low level (under 5 %). The novelty of our findings was that children who initially discovered how to deceive shared less than the children who didn't use this deceptive strategy. Nonetheless, this pattern was reversed at follow-up. Furthermore, ToM positively predicted deceptive behavior across all sessions and improved after the microgenetic sessions but wasn't related with deception at follow-up. Implications for enabling children to deploy the growing understanding of their worlds in a more prosocial way are discussed.