BCIA Continuing Education Posts

HRV is exquisitely sensitive to how, when, and under what conditions you measure it. Get the protocol wrong, and you will be chasing noise rather than signal.

Training individuals to self-regulate both autonomic activity and prefrontal blood oxygenation may enhance specific components of inhibitory control that rely on prefrontal circuitry.

Heart rate variability is not a mistake in the system. It is a living signature of how the nervous system is regulating the heart in real-time.

Slow-paced contraction (SPC) training to increase HRV can also benefit from multichannel systems.

Neurophysiological assessment serves not as an independent diagnostic tool but as a physiologically grounded framework for understanding how clients process information, regulate emotions, respond to stressors, and organize their behavior.

Dr. Paul Lehrer offered a masterclass in humility, collaboration, and the relentless pursuit of understanding how the body heals itself.

Clients can perform SPC correctly with minimal instruction.

A null result does not always mean that the independent variable (the factor manipulated by the researcher) does not affect on the dependent variable (the outcome being measured).

Slow-paced contraction (SPC) is an indispensable HRV training exercise because it provides a direct, rhythmic means of engaging the autonomic nervous system through gentle, coordinated muscle activity.

A comprehensive meta-analysis of 138 studies found that facial feedback does have a statistically significant effect on emotional experience, but the effect is small and highly variable.

Dr. Gevirtz's journey began in 1964 as an undergraduate psychology major at the University of Wisconsin.

A growing body of research and clinical innovation has underscored the need to integrate multiple therapeutic modalities like neurofeedback and biofeedback when working with clients who present with complex psychological and physiological concerns.

Mentor is the most widely used GPT for biofeedback, HRV biofeedback, and neurofeedback didactic learning.

Using a large nationally representative dataset, the researchers found that people hospitalized for TBI were more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychotic conditions than similar individuals without TBI.

Before a diagnosis of a mental disorder can be made, the clinician must rule out that the symptoms are not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance or another medical condition.

Dr. Heidi Hillman’s (2025) study explored the application of heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback to reduce anger in autistic adolescents.

Small-N designs are particularly powerful when the treatment effect is large and immediate, allowing researchers to infer causality with confidence.

The goal of this post is to help you think like a scientist when it comes to evaluating questionable claims.

To support a causal claim, a study must meet three essential criteria: covariance, temporal precedence, and internal validity.

Interrogating association claims means asking three core questions: Were the variables measured well (construct validity)? Can the results be generalized to other populations (external validity)? And is the association statistically strong, significant, and precise (statistical validity)?