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Clinical Trial Summary

Imaginal exposure is a widely used and effective psychological treatment technique in which patients are exposed to fearful stimuli and situations using mental imagery. This study examines imaginal extinction, an experimental analogue of imaginal exposure that allows the study of this treatment technique under controlled circumstances. During imaginal extinction, conditioned fear is diminished through repeated exposure to mental imagery of the feared (conditioned) stimulus. The neural underpinnings of imaginal extinction is not known, and hence, this study examines neural activations during imaginal extinction using psychophysiology and brain imaging.


Clinical Trial Description

In this study, participants undergo threat conditioning to two pictures (CS+, CS-) in order to acquire a conditioned threat response. After this, the conditioned threat response is diminished through imaginal extinction (i.e extinction to the mental imagery of CS+ and CS-). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (7T) is used to measure neural activations during threat conditioning and imaginal extinction. Skin conductance is used to measure arousal response. Subjective fear and mental imagery vividness ratings will also be collected. In this way, this study aims to characterize the neural underpinnings of imaginal extinction. Note that this study employs participants fearful of spiders. This is because data collection is shared with a related study (ClinicalTrials.gov ID 2020-06930a). ;


Study Design


Related Conditions & MeSH terms


NCT number NCT05168592
Study type Interventional
Source Uppsala University
Contact Thomas Ågren, PhD
Phone +46(0)184712124
Email thomas.agren@psyk.uu.se
Status Recruiting
Phase N/A
Start date April 7, 2022
Completion date December 2022

See also
  Status Clinical Trial Phase
Completed NCT04162509 - Efficacy of a Gamified Augmented Reality Exposure-based Application in Subjects With Fear of Spiders N/A
Completed NCT03907345 - Generalized Fear Extinction to Untreated Fear Stimuli in Specific Phobias After Exposure N/A
Recruiting NCT05193383 - Neural Mechanisms of Imaginal and in Vivo Exposure N/A