Clinical Trial Details
— Status: Completed
Administrative data
NCT number |
NCT03033056 |
Other study ID # |
1610M96641 |
Secondary ID |
|
Status |
Completed |
Phase |
|
First received |
|
Last updated |
|
Start date |
July 17, 2017 |
Est. completion date |
August 1, 2021 |
Study information
Verified date |
March 2022 |
Source |
University of Minnesota |
Contact |
n/a |
Is FDA regulated |
No |
Health authority |
|
Study type |
Observational
|
Clinical Trial Summary
Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent, costly, and disabling mental illnesses. One
central, yet largely understudied, abnormality in anxiety disorders is the heightened
tendency to display fear and avoidance in reaction to benign or safe events that resemble
feared situations. The current project maps brain circuits associated with this abnormality
in order to contribute to future brain-based diagnosis and treatments for clinical anxiety.
Description:
The objective of this project is to neurally, behaviorally, psychologically, and clinically
characterize fundamental Pavlovian and instrumental dimensions of potential threat through
which emotional and behavioral responses to threat cues generalize to resembling, safe
stimuli. Such generalization is aligned with the potential threat construct due to the threat
ambiguity, or uncertain threat value, inherent in these safe 'generalization' stimuli. The
Pavlovian dimension of interest is generalization of conditioned fear: a fundamental
Pavlovian process through which fear transfers, or generalizes, to safe stimuli resembling a
conditioned threat-cue (CS+). The targeted instrumental dimension is generalized avoidance:
active decisions to withdraw from safe stimuli resembling the CS+ that are motivationally
prompted by Pavlovian generalization. Given lab-based findings have linked heightened
Pavlovian generalization to a variety of traditional anxiety disorders, overgeneralization
represents a promising dimension of potential threat with relevance across traditional
anxiety disorders. One central aspect of this project is testing personality and psychiatric
factors (e.g., trait fear, internalizing, externalizing) that may account for the relevance
of generalization and its neurobiology across traditional anxiety disorders. A second key
aspect, is studying neural processes by which Pavlovian generalization evokes instrumental
generalized avoidance of benign stimuli (resembling danger cues), which, when excessive, is
likely to impair day-to-day functioning in anxiety patients. Unfortunately, human
fear-conditioning experiments in clinical samples, have focused almost exclusively on
passive-emotional, Pavlovian conditioning, to the virtual exclusion of studying
active-behavioral, instrumental avoidance. The current neuroimaging project fills this gap by
applying a novel Pavlovian-instrumental generalization paradigm to neurally and behaviorally
elucidate Pavlovian processes leading to generalized instrumental avoidance. Personality
moderators (e.g., dispositional resilience) of relations between Pavlovian and instrumental
generalization will also be examined. The studied adult samples will display a wide range of
symptom severity across traditional anxiety disorders and will include anxiety-clinic
patients and healthy comparisons (N=159). Central goals of this proposal include: 1)
elucidating the neurobiology of Pavlovian and instrumental generalization and their
interaction, 2) testing relations between neural substrates of Pavlovian and instrumental
generalization and broad psychiatric dysfunction (Aims2-3); and 3) assessing the degree to
which relations between these dimensions of generalization and broad dysfunction are driven
by psychometrically validated personality traits relevant across traditional anxiety
disorders. This third and final goal is critical to the project, because individual
difference measures capturing empirically-validated psychological constructs will likely
track relations between fundamental conditioning processes (e.g., generalization) and general
dysfunction, better than traditional, polythetic, diagnostic entities, that, by and large, do
not reflect any single coherent psychological process.