PhD Defence Ruben Andreas Bressler

Keywords: fMRI, Neurofeedback, Police, Emotion regulation  
 

"Neurofeedback for Performance: Improving the Mental Resilience of Dutch Police Special Forces"

Special Forces officers, tasked with critical missions such as anti-terror interventions and arrests of armed criminals, face unique challenges. Their missions can extend over prolonged periods, requiring quick life-and-death decisions under high pressure. Despite rigorous selection and training, Special Forces officers still experience stress reactions during both training and active operations.  

This thesis focuses on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) based Neurofeedback training for Dutch Special Forces recruits on two critical aspects: emotion regulation while exposed to threatening stimuli and sustained attention during task performance. 

This thesis showed that Dutch Police Special Forces recruits can improve in their emotion regulation capabilities and that they can achieve levels below the pre-stimulus baseline. 

In the sustained attention training participants decreased in their performance over time. This thesis investigated the underlying reasons for the inadequate performance and found that it can be attributed to technical issues in data acquisition and made recommendations for future improvements. 

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