Driving Distress Secondary to Trauma During Deployment Clinical Trial
Official title:
Enhancing Emotion Regulation During Driving in OEF/OIF Veterans
Many U.S. military personnel are returning from Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) deployments with histories of trauma while driving in military vehicles. The proposed project aims to develop and test a rehabilitative technology aimed at enhancing emotion regulation and reducing operator-related risk during civilian driving.
The driving exercises to be used are based upon standard Veterans Affairs-based driver
assessments which have a well-established safety record and have been applied to a
wide-range of medically-related and post-deployment driving issues.
Specifically, the driving exercises will embed a test-intervene-test session plan within a
structured hierarchy of four progressively more challenging civilian driving tasks
administered on successive weeks. Participants will drive local roads and highways familiar
to Veterans Affairs - Palo Alto Health Care System Certified Driving Rehabilitation
Specialists (CDRS). These courses have known characteristics as regards civilian driving
challenges and OEF/OIF-relevant "trigger" stimuli. Graduation from one course to the next
will take place only with permission from the CDRS who has accompanied the participant on
the prior exercise. Based upon their self-reports of driving-related distress, we expect
such distress to arise during the driving exercises. At such times, participants will be
instructed to park in the next available safe parking location. They will be induced to
rapidly achieve reduced autonomic arousal through use of a graphics-rich biofeedback
procedure and simultaneously engage in the generation and rehearsal of cognitive reappraisal
scripts under the coaching of project therapist also in the vehicle. These individualized
procedures are expected to quickly lower emotional reactivity to subjectively adverse
driving events and conditions. The participant will then drive the course a second time.
Each session will finish with a graphical comparison of pre- and post-intervention vehicle
and control surface movement parameters, visual attentional control, autonomic arousal and
subjective driving distress.
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Allocation: Randomized, Endpoint Classification: Efficacy Study, Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment, Masking: Single Blind (Subject), Primary Purpose: Treatment