View clinical trials related to Emotional Processing.
Filter by:The goal of this study is to investigate how a common antidepressant citalopram (which increases the levels of the chemical messenger serotonin), affects how a key area of the brain involved in depression (the amygdala) responds to emotional information. Healthy participants will undergo medical and psychiatric health screening, after which they will be assigned to receive either a single dose of citalopram (20mg) or placebo, and undergo brain scanning (7T fMRI) whilst viewing emotional faces. Since the scan uses high field strength, the investigators will be able to see effects of citalopram on different subfields within the amygdala which will help to understand how citalopram might be working.
The aim of this study is to explore whether a brief mental exercise (developed and widely advocated in the field of positive psychology) can change the processing of emotion-related information in a similar way as previously observed for antidepressant drugs. Healthy volunteers are randomly allocated to a 7-day practice of the "Three Good Things" (TGT) exercise or a previously used placebo exercise (unspecified childhood memory recall) with study participants as well as investigators being blind as to which practice is conducted. After a 7-day practice period, all study participants undergo testing with the Oxford Emotional Test Battery, an established battery of cognitive tasks that allow to assess how emotional information is processed. The working hypothesis of the study is that the TGT exercise, as compared to the placebo exercise, can push the processing of emotional information towards a prioritisation of positive (relative to negative) input.