Change mechanisms in EMG biofeedback training: Cognitive changes underlying improvements in tension headache.

Abstract

Forty-three college students suffering from recurrent tension headache were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 elec-tromyographic (EMG) biofeedback training conditions. Although all subjects were led to believe they were learning to decrease frontal EMG activity, actual feedback was contingent on decreased EMG activity for half of the subjects and increased EMG activity for the other half. Within these 2 groups, subjects also viewed bogus video displays designed to convince them they were achieving large (high success) or small (moderate success) reductions in EMG activity. Regardless of actual changes in EMG activity, subjects receiving high-success feedback showed substantially greater improvement in headache activity (53%) than subjects receiving moderate success feedback (26%). Performance feedback was also related to changes in locus of control and self-efficacy. Changes in these 2 cog-nitive variables during biofeedback training were also correlated with reductions in headache activity following treatment, whereas changes in EMG activity exhibited during training were uncorrelated with outcome. These results suggest that the effectiveness of EMG biofeedback training with tension headache may be mediated by cog-nitive changes induced by performance feedback and not primarily by reductions in EMG activity. My favorite headache article remains the 1984 article by Holroyd, Penzien, and colleagues. This influential study was the first to demonstrate that the effectiveness of bio-feedback may be mediated by cognitive changes induced through biofeedback training rather than primarily by learned physiological control. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the rationale for biofeedback training as an intervention for recurrent headache was derived from the widely accepted notion that migraine was a vascular phenomenon and tension-type headache was a musculo-skeletal phenomenon. Accordingly, thermal and elec-tromyographic (EMG) biofeedback targeted the supposed physiological responses involved in migraine and tension-type headache, respectively. The 1984 study manipulated both the contingency of the feedback in EMG biofeedback training and patients' perceptions of their success with biofeedback, using a 2 (EMG increase vs EMG decrease) ¥ 2 (high vs moderate success) experimental design. Results demonstrated headache improvement with biofeedback regardless of whether patients had been trained to decrease or to increase EMG activity. Furthermore, superior headache improvement was achieved by the group who received the "high success" condition, regardless of biofeedback training. Headache improvements instead correlated with cognitive changes in self-efficacy and locus of control. The exemplary study challenged the popular beliefs of the day about mechanisms of biofeedback, and moreover raised questions for the prevailing notions concerning basic pathophysiology of so-called muscle contraction headache. Although previous studies had questioned the mechanisms of biofeedback with altered-contingency control conditions, this study surpa...

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