BCBL Develops New Neurofeedback Protocols to Regulate Emotional Awareness
David Soto, an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the centre, has been awarded €500,000 in the latest call for biomedical and health research projects funded by the “la Caixa” Foundation
The initiative will focus on alexithymia, a personality trait affecting one in ten people and characterised by a persistent inability to identify, describe and process emotions.
David Soto, Ikerbasque Research Professor and leader of the Consciousness research group at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), has been awarded €500,000 in the latest call for biomedical and health research projects funded by the “la Caixa” Foundation.
BCBL’s selected project focuses on alexithymia, a personality trait affecting one in ten people and characterised by a persistent inability or difficulty in identifying, describing, regulating and expressing emotions.
“Alexithymia is associated with conditions such as depression, anxiety and autism. However, the underlying brain mechanisms remain largely unknown, and there are still very few interventions available to improve emotional awareness,” explains David Soto.
Against this backdrop, the research aims to examine how the brain represents emotions in individuals with different levels of alexithymia and to develop new protocols that combine neurofeedback and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to modulate the brain’s representation of emotions.
A Neurofeedback-Based Strategy
The project led by David Soto brings together a team of specialists in areas including neuroscience, psychology, mental health and AI technologies to identify, in real time and through brain-computer interfaces, patterns of brain activity associated with different emotional states.
These patterns will subsequently be used to train participants through neurofeedback, a non-invasive technique that enables the brain to regulate its own neural activity, with the aim of improving emotional processing.
Finally, the BCBL team will explore ways to make this methodology portable and accessible, providing people with alexithymia with personalised interventions that can complement psychotherapy and help enhance emotional awareness and self-regulation.
The Basque organisation is one of the 32 institutions from Spain and Portugal selected in the ninth edition of the Health Research Call.
Through these grants, the “la Caixa” Foundation supports basic, clinical and translational research projects addressing major challenges in biomedicine and health across several fields, including neuroscience, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, oncology, infectious diseases, and enabling technologies related to these areas.
