Talma Hendler

Dissociation, an altered state of consciousness in which individuals feel detached from their body, environment, and sense of self, is a common feature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Despite its significance, the neurocognitive processes underlying dissociation remain poorly understood, potentially limiting the effectiveness of PTSD diag...

Background Fibromyalgia (FM), involving somatic, cognitive, and affective domains is often regarded as a hallmark central sensitization syndrome. Despite limited current therapeutic options, emerging understanding of its neural underpinnings offers the potential of applying novel neuromodulation strategies. Specifically, limbic dysregulation underl...

Neurofeedback (NF) has emerged as a promising avenue for demonstrating process-related neuroplasticity, enabling self-regulation of brain function. NF targeting the amygdala has drawn attention to therapeutic potential in psychiatry, by potentially harnessing emotion-regulation processes. However, not all individuals respond equally to NF training,...

Neurofeedback (NF) is endogenous neuromodulation of circumscribed brain circuitry. While its use of real-time brain activity in a closed-loop system is similar to brain–computer interfaces, instead of controlling an external device like the latter, the goal of NF is to change a targeted brain function. In this special issue on NF, we present curren...

The placebo response is associated with a positive expectation of recovery. Recent studies in mice uncovered a potential underlying mechanism of placebo effects, by demonstrating the involvement of the dopaminergic mesolimbic pathway, previously implicated in reward expectation, in immune modulation. Yet, it is not known whether an analogous brain-...

Background Empathy refers to the cognitive and emotional reactions of an individual to the experiences of another. Women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) report severe social difficulties during the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle. Aims This clinical and functional magnetic resonance imaging study aimed to explore affective and co...

We employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to convert unstructured psychological interviews into structured questionnaires spanning various psychiatric and personality domains. The LLM is prompted to answer these questionnaires by impersonating the interviewee. The obtained answers are coded as features, which are used to predict standardized psychiatr...

Neurofeedback (NF) has emerged as a promising avenue for demonstrating process-related neuroplasticity, enabling self-regulation of brain function. NF targeting the amygdala has drawn attention for therapeutic potential in psychiatry, by potentially harnessing emotion-regulation processes. However, not all individuals respond equally to NF training...

Background: The weak link between subjective symptom-based diagnostics of posttraumatic psychopathology and objectively measured neurobiological indices forms a barrier to effective treatment development. To bridge this gap, we sought reproducible associations between early resting-state brain activity and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sympt...

Disordered autonomic nervous system regulation and supraspinal pain inhibition have been repeatedly described in chronic pain. We aimed to explore the effects of δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), an emerging treatment option, on autonomic nervous system and central pain modulation measures in patients with chronic pain. Twelve male patients with chro...

Appraisal refers to the evaluation of stimuli or situations with respect to an individual’s goals and needs. Stimuli or situations that are appraised as a threat to one’ goals and needs (‘stressors’) induce stress responses (‘stress’). Stressor appraisal occurs on various dimensions, of which the magnitude or cost of a potential adverse outcome, th...

Objective A pilot study to preliminarily examine the effects of Prism EFP NeuroFeedback (NF) in adult ADHD. Method Prism EFP NF is a form of NF specifically designed to target emotional dysregulation (ED) through down regulation of amygdala activity. Prism EFP NF has been shown to improve other disorders with significant ED. Nine participants with...

Background The modulation of brain circuits of emotion is a promising pathway to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD). Precise and scalable approaches have yet to be established. Two studies investigating the amygdala-related electrical fingerprint (Amyg-EFP) in BPD are presented: one study addressing the deep-brain correlates of Amyg-EFP, a...

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective const...

Stress engages multiple neurobiological modifications and a failure to regulate these may lead to chronic psychiatric problems. Despite considerable research, it remains unclear how neural alterations of acute stress reflect the ability to cope with chronic stress. The current longitudinal study examined the whole-brain network dynamics following i...

Background Stress-related disorders such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent and cause a tremendous burden for affected individuals and society. In order to improve prevention strategies, knowledge regarding resilience mechanisms and ways to boost them is highly needed. In the Dynamic Modelling of Resilience – interventional multicenter...

Aim: Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) among women is an alarmingly prevalent traumatic experience, that often leads to debilitating and treatment-refractory Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) raising the need for novel adjunctive therapies. Neuroimaging investigations systematically report amygdala hyperactivity is the most consistent and reliable...

Music is a complex phenomenon that elicits a range of emotional responses, influenced by numerous variables, such as rhythm, melody and harmony. One interesting aspect of music is listeners’ ability to predict its continuation as it unfolds – an inherent attribute hypothesized to contribute to our emotional response to music. In this study, we inve...

Background: Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychol...

Background: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been associated with altered emotion processing and modulation in specific brain regions, i.e. amygdala, insula, medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. Functional alterations in these regions, recorded shortly after trauma exposure, may predict changes in PTSD symptoms. Methods: Su...

Aim: To assess the efficacy of a novel neurofeedback (NF) method, targeting limbic activity, to treat emotional dysregulation related to premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Method: We applied a NF probe targeting limbic activity using an fMRI-inspired EEG model (termed Amyg-EFP-NF) in a double-blind randomized controlled trial. A frontal alp...

Visual areas activated during perception can retain specific information held in memory without the presence of the physical stimuli, via distributed activity patterns. Neuroimaging studies have shown that delay-period representation of information in visual areas is modulated by factors such as memory load and task demands, raising the possibility...

Reward processing is essential for our mental-health and well-being. In the current study, we developed and validated a scalable, fMRI-informed EEG model for monitoring reward processing related to activation in the ventral-striatum (VS), a significant node in the brain's reward system. To develop this EEG-based model of VS-related activation, we c...

Background: The modulation of brain circuits of emotion is a promising pathway to treat Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Precise and scalable approaches have yet to be established. Two studies investigating the Amygdala Electrical Fingerprint (Amyg-EFP) in BPD are presented: One study addressing the deep-brain correlates of Amyg-EFP, and a se...

Background: Guilt and Shame, two core self-related emotions, often emerge following trauma and play an important role in the development and maintenance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Importantly, Guilt and Shame exhibit specific focal and non-specific global impacts of trauma on self-perception, respectively. Objective and Methods: Inte...

Introduction Episodes of eating great quantities of extremely sweet and often aversive tasting food are a hallmark of bulimia nervosa. This unique eating pattern led researchers to seek and find differences in taste perception between patients and healthy control subjects. However, it is currently not known if these originate from central or periph...

Linking scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals and spontaneous firing activity from deep nuclei in humans is not trivial. To examine this, we analyzed simultaneous recordings of scalp EEG and unit activity in deeply located sites recorded overnight from patients undergoing pre-surgical invasive monitoring. We focused on modeling the within-subj...

Objective: The weak link between subjective symptom-based diagnostic methods for posttraumatic psychopathology and objectively measured neurobiological indices forms a barrier to the development of effective personalized treatments. To overcome this problem, recent studies have aimed to stratify psychiatric disorders by identifying consistent subg...

The right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) is a region involved in the neural underpinning of cognitive control across several domains such as inhibitory control and attentional allocation process. Therefore, it constitutes a desirable neural target for brain-guided interventions such as neurofeedback (NF). To date, rIFG-NF has shown beneficial abilit...

Reward processing is essential for our mental-health and well-being. Here, we present the development and validation of a scalable fMRI-informed EEG model related to reward processing in the ventral-striatum (VS); a central reward circuit node. Simultaneous EEG/fMRI data were acquired from 17 healthy individuals listening to pleasurable music, and...

Human pain is a salient stimulus composed of two main components: a sensory\somatic component, carrying peripheral nociceptive sensation via the spino-thalamic tract and brainstem nuclei to the thalamus and then to sensory cortical regions, and an affective (suffering) component, where information from central thalamic nuclei is carried to the ante...

The hippocampus and the amygdala play a central role in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) pathogenesis. While alternations in volumes of both regions have been consistently observed in individuals with PTSD, it remains unknown whether these reflect pre-trauma vulnerability traits or acquired post-trauma consequences of the disorder. Here, we co...

Passive listening to music, without sound production or evident movement, is long known to activate motor control regions. Nevertheless, the exact neuroanatomical correlates of the auditory-motor association and its underlying neural mechanisms have not been fully determined. Here, based on a NeuroSynth meta-analysis and three original fMRI paradig...

We obtain a personal signature of a person’s learning progress in a self-neuromodulation task, guided by functional MRI (fMRI). The signature is based on predicting the activity of the Amygdala in a second neurofeedback session, given a similar fMRI-derived brain state in the first session. The prediction is made by a deep neural network, which is...

Forming positive beliefs about one’s ability to perform challenging tasks, often termed self-efficacy, is fundamental to motivation and emotional well-being. Self-efficacy crucially depends on positive social feedback, yet people differ in the degree to which they integrate such feedback into self-beliefs (i.e., positive bias). While diminished pos...

The functional neural mechanisms underlying the cognitive benefits of aerobic exercise have been a subject of ongoing research in recent years. However, while most neuroimaging studies to date which examined functional neural correlates of aerobic exercise have used simple stimuli in highly controlled and artificial experimental conditions, our eve...

Forming positive beliefs about one’s ability to perform challenging tasks, often termed self-efficacy, is fundamental to motivation and emotional well-being. Self-efficacy crucially depends on positive social feedback, yet people differ in the degree to which they integrate such feedback into self-beliefs (i.e., positive bias). While diminished pos...

The hippocampus and the amygdala play a central role in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) pathogenesis. While alternations in volumes of both regions have been consistently observed in individuals with PTSD, it remains unknown whether these reflect pre-trauma vulnerability traits or acquired post-trauma consequences of the disorder. Here, we co...

Background Negative self-views, especially in the domain of power (i.e. social-rank), characterize social anxiety (SA). Neuroimaging studies on self-evaluations in SA have mainly focused on subcortical threat processing systems. Yet, self-evaluation may concurrently invoke diverse affective processing, as motivational systems related to desired sel...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

BACKGROUND Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerabl...

Background Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psycholo...

Amygdala dysregulation is a core dysfunction in multiple psychiatric disorders. Thus, the introduction of Amygdala self-modulation through NeuroFeedback (NF) is a valuable non-invasive intervention tool. Yet, the feasibility and best practices of Amygdala-NF have not been systematically examined. The current perspective presents a thorough review o...

Background Chronic pain disorders are often associated with cognitive-emotional dysregulation. However, the relations between such dysregulation, underlying brain processes, and clinical symptom constellations, remain unclear. Here, we aimed to characterize the abnormalities in cognitive-emotional processing involved in fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS)...

Despite decades of experimental and clinical practice, the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying neurofeedback (NF) training remain obscure. NF is a unique form of reinforcement learning (RL) task, during which participants are provided with rewarding feedback regarding desired changes in neural patterns. However, key RL considerations – includi...

“Do what you do best” conveys an intuition about the association between ability and preference. In the field of emotion regulation, ability and preference are manifested in two central stages, namely, implementation and selection of regulatory strategies, which to date have been mainly studied separately. Accordingly, the present proof-of-concept...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a protracted and debilitating consequence of traumatic events. Identifying early predictors of PTSD can inform the disorder’s risk stratification and prevention. We used advanced computational models to evaluate the contribution of early neurocognitive performance measures to the accuracy of predicting chron...

INTRODUCTION The “salience network” is normally engaged in humans’ response to acute internal or environmental stimuli, including pain. It comprises connections between the anterior insula (AI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), among others. Chronic pain conditions have been associated with abnormally increased functional connectivity (F...

Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerable young adu...

Awareness theory posits that individuals connected to a brain-computer interface can learn to estimate and discriminate their brain states. We used the amygdala Electrical Fingerprint (amyg-EFP) - a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-inspired Electroencephalogram surrogate of deep brain activation - to investigate whether participants could accu...

We obtain a personal signature of a person's learning progress in a self-neuromodulation task, guided by functional MRI (fMRI). The signature is based on predicting the activity of the Amygdala in a second neurofeedback session, given a similar fMRI-derived brain state in the first session. The prediction is made by a deep neural network, which is...

We present the TFF Transformer framework for the analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. TFF employs a transformer-based architecture and a two-phase training approach. First, self-supervised training is applied to a collection of fMRI scans, where the model is trained for the reconstruction of 3D volume data. Second, the pre...

We present a deep neural network method for learning a personal representation for individuals that are performing a self neuromodulation task, guided by functional MRI (fMRI). This neurofeedback task (watch vs. regulate) provides the subjects with a continuous feedback contingent on down regulation of their Amygdala signal and the learning algorit...

Background Contemporary views of emotion dysregulation in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) highlight reduced ability to flexibly select regulatory strategies according to differing situational demands. However, empirical evidence of reduced regulatory selection flexibility in PTSD is lacking. Multiple studies show that healthy individuals demo...

Amygdala dysregulation is core to multiple psychiatric disorders. Real-time fMRI enables Amygdala self-modulation through NeuroFeedback (NF). Despite a surge in Amygdala-NF studies, a systematic quantification of self-modulation is lacking. Amygdala-NF dissemination is further restricted by absence of unifying framework dictating design choices and...

Alterations in hippocampal function have been shown in older adults, which are expressed as changes in hippocampal activity and connectivity. While hippocampal activation during memory demands has been demonstrated to decrease with age, some older individuals present increased activity, or hyperactivity, of the hippocampus which is associated with...

Background Amygdala activity dysregulation plays a central role in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Hence learning to self-regulate one's amygdala activity may facilitate recovery. PTSD is further characterized by abnormal contextual processing related to the traumatic memory. Therefore, provoking the personal traumatic narrative while traini...

Aging is associated with compromised neurocognition. While aerobic exercise has been linked with cognitive resilience, findings regarding its relationship with brain morphology are inconsistent. Furthermore, the biological underpinnings of the relationship between aerobic activity and memory in the aging human brain are unclear. To investigate thes...

Background: Processing negative and positive valenced stimuli involve multiple brain regions including the amygdala and ventral striatum (VS). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is often associated with hyper-responsivity to negatively valenced, yet recent evidence also points to deficient positive valence functioning. It is yet unclear what is...

Polymicrogyria (PMG) is a common malformation of cortical development associated with a higher susceptibility to epileptic seizures. Seizures secondary to PMG are characterized by difficult-to-localize cerebral sources due to the complex and widespread lesion structure. Tracing the dynamics of interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) in patients w...

Early intervention following exposure to a traumatic life event could change the clinical path from the development of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to recovery, hence the interest in early detection and underlying biological mechanisms involved in the development of post traumatic sequelae. We introduce a novel end-to-end neural network th...

The personality trait of neuroticism is considered a risk factor for stress vulnerability, putatively via its association with elevated limbic reactivity. Nevertheless, majority of evidence to date that relates neuroticism, neural reactivity and stress vulnerability stems from cross-sectional studies conducted in a “stress-free” environment. Here,...

Alterations in hippocampal function have been shown in older adults, expressed as changes in hippocampal activity and connectivity. While hippocampal activation during memory demands have been demonstrated to decrease with age, some older individuals present increased activity, or hyperactivity, of the hippocampus which is associated with increased...

Real-time fMRI neurofeedback is an increasingly popular neuroimaging technique that allows an individual to gain control over his/her own brain signals, which can lead to improvements in behavior in healthy participants as well as to improvements of clinical symptoms in patient populations. However, a considerably large ratio of participants underg...

Background: Aerobic training has been shown to promote structural and functional neurocognitive plasticity in cognitively intact older adults. However, little is known about the neuroplastic potential of aerobic exercise in individuals at risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia. Objective: We aimed to explore the effect of aerobic exercise...

Negative and positive valence systems (NVS and PVS) pertain to processing of aversive and rewarding stimuli, respectively. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been typically associated with hyper-responsivity of the NVS, and more recently, with deficient PVS functionality. The respective roles of these systems in early PTSD development have y...

Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. Although increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes, as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resi...

This chapter reviews existing work on fMRI neurofeedback in disorders of emotion regulation such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, and anxiety disorders. We present a framework of what to target (disturbed or compensatory functions) as well as how to target (what interface to use and whether to up or dow...

Training an individual to change dysfunctional patterns of neural activity is an exciting way to harness neuroscience to improve mental health and wellbeing. In this chapter, the way forward in translating neurofeedback (NF) into effective clinical procedures is discussed. Focus is given to (1) how the precision of neural targeting might be improve...

Maximal aerobic capacity (MAC) has been associated with preserved neural tissue or brain maintenance (BM) in healthy older adults, including the hippocampus. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is considered a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease. While aMCI is characterized by hippocampal deterioration, the MAC‐hippocampal relationship in...

These authors contributed equally to this work. All other authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards...