An artistic approach to neurofeedback for emotion regulation

Abstract

While literature has suggested that neurofeedback performance improves when sensory feedback is related to the pathology under consideration, it is still difficult to represent a proper feedback representative of our emotional state. In this study, we have initiated a collaboration between neuroscientists and artists to develop a visual representation of emotions. Emotions were represented as particles moving in a white sphere according to valence and arousal levels. Several possibilities for particle control were explored: direction of particles, their concentration in a specific place, or their gravity. Participants were asked to evaluate these possibilities on scales ranging from 0 to 5 on how artistic the different representations were and could be used as a clinical activity, whether they thought they had successfully controlled the particles during the neurofeedback exercise, and whether they had appreciated the experience. We found that controlling the direction and concentration of particles was considered the most artistic, with an average score around 3 out of 5, and that 47% of the 107 participants considered the concentration of particles as artistic. In addition, we found that participants could significantly control the direction of particles during this session. Our approach constitutes a first step before evaluating the effectiveness of our emotional neurofeedback over several sessions.