View clinical trials related to Psychophysiology.
Filter by:Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementias (ADRD) not only exact a heavy toll on patients, they also impose an enormous emotional, physical, and financial burden on unpaid, often family, caregivers. The strain of providing care for a loved one diagnosed with AD, often across several years, is associated with elevated depression risk and poorer overall health. Emotion regulation skills represent an ideal target for psychological intervention to promote healthy coping in ADRD caregivers. The project seeks to use an experimental medicine approach to test the efficacy and biobehavioral mechanisms of a novel, relatively brief, targeted, scalable, smartphone-based cognitive emotion regulation intervention aimed at improving psychological outcomes (i.e., reducing perceived stress, caregiver burden, and depressive symptoms) in ADRD unpaid primary caregivers as well as examine potential benefits of the caregiver intervention on quality of life in care recipients. Cognitive reappraisal is the ability to modify the trajectory of an emotional response by thinking about and appraising emotional information in an alternative, more adaptive way. Reappraisal can be operationalized via two primary tactics: psychological distancing (i.e. appraising an emotional stimulus as an objective, impartial observer) and reinterpretation (i.e., imagining a better outcome than what initially seemed apparent). The project will investigate the efficacy and underlying biobehavioral mechanisms of a novel, one-week cognitive reappraisal intervention in this population, with follow-up assessments at 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 3 months. ADRD unpaid primary caregivers will be randomly assigned to receive training in either distancing, reinterpretation, or a no regulation natural history control condition, with ecological momentary assessments of self-reported positive and negative affect, remotely- collected psychophysiological health-related biomarkers (i.e., heart rate variability data) using pre-mailed Polar H10 chest bands, and health-related questionnaire reports. Distancing training is expected to result in longitudinal reductions in self-reported negative affect, longitudinal increases in positive affect, and longitudinal increases in HRV that are larger than those attributable to reinterpretation training and no-regulation control training.
Diaphragmatic breathing brings different advantages to improve physical and mental health but it could be difficult for the physically disabled group to follow the practice by themselves especially those with vision impairment. Therefore, guided deep breathing is desirable to address their needs but these are rarely analyzed in the previous literature. This research aims to study the physiological impacts and psychological health of audio-guided deep breathing on physically disabled groups. The psychological changes will be assessed by Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHO-BREF) and Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R). Besides, physiological parameters such as tidal volume, electroencephalography, hair cortisol level and heart rate variability are measured non-invasively to evaluate the impact of audio-guided deep breathing. Furthermore, auditory Go-No Go Task will be adopted as a neuropsychological test in determining changes in response control and sustained attention in this study as well. Eventually, the pre-and post-interventional data will be analyzed and processed to study the effect of audio-guided deep breathing on these special groups.
In this study, a new psychosocial training for social relationships for adults will be evaluated. In a 6-module course, with four 3-day modules and two 5-day modules in the timeframe of one year, participants learn ways to strengthen their personal resources to establish effective social relationships and to develop skills as a social being. In between the module courses, the participants take 5 single sessions with an instructed trainer and document 10 conversations/social situations where they successfully apply the acquired personal and social skills. For my study, I will recruit a total of 200 persons. Approx. one hundred participants for the intervention group and 100 individuals for the control group. During the course of the training, the participants are taught social and personal skills that should result in a lower perceived stress level in daily life, improved health behaviour, a decreased presence of common somatic symptoms, a higher satisfaction with their lives, improved quality of their social relationships and a higher wellbeing. Data from study participants having accomplished additional training programs with the same training provider will be used to evaluate the influence on the results compared to participants without the extra addition for this study. The training participants will be assessed together with the controls. All study participants will be evaluated with standardized online questionnaires.
Previous studies indicated that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often suffer from deficits in executive function, such as attentional control, inhibition, and working memory. One of these executive functions, working memory, plays a critical role in academic performance and classroom behavior. Working memory is essential for performing complex cognitive tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning. Several studies have shown that training of working memory has positive effects for ADHD and other cognitive disorder in children. However, transfer effects across studies appear to be variable and inconsistent. Event-related potentials can be a useful tool to gain insights into such mechanism. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate both near and far transfer effects of N-back training in children with ADHD. In addition, the recording and analysis of event-related potentials will be adopted while children with ADHD perform the complex visuo-spatial and phonological working memory tasks.