Emotional Processing Clinical Trial
Official title:
Can Brief Daily Mental Exercises Change the Way the Human Brain Processes Certain Kinds of Information?
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.
Background and objective:
Previous research indicates that various physiological treatments for depression (especially
antidepressant drugs) can induce positive biases in emotional information processing and it
has been suggested that this might be a crucial common mechanism through which they exert
their clinical effects. This study aims to investigate whether similar positive biases can
also be induced by a brief mental exercise (developed and widely used within the field of
positive psychology) that has previously been shown to have antidepressant and/or
happiness-enhancing effects.
Methods:
Using a double-blind, parallel-group design, 100 healthy volunteers (male and female) are
randomly allocated to a 7-day mental exercise practice conducting either the widely reported
Three Good Things (TGT) exercise or a previously established placebo condition (unspecific
childhood memory recall). After 7 days of practice, all participants undergo testing with the
Oxford Emotional Test Battery in order to assess emotional information processing in
different cognitive domains. This battery consists of a facial expression recognition task,
an emotional categorization task, an emotional dot probe task, an emotional recall task and
an emotional recognition task. In addition, prior to and immediately after the 7-day practice
period salivary cortisol awakening response and subjective state (using various
questionnaires) is assessed.
Hypotheses:
The working hypothesis of the study is that, similar to physiological antidepressant
interventions, the TGT exercise (as compared to the placebo exercise) might induce biases
towards positive stimuli in multiple cognitive domains.
Implications of the study:
This study will show whether engaging in a simple mental exercise can alter emotional
information processing in a similar way as previously observed for antidepressant drugs and
other physiological interventions.
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| Status | Clinical Trial | Phase | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Not yet recruiting |
NCT06412315 -
7T Amygdala and Citalopram Study
|
N/A |