Can Brief Daily Mental Exercises Change the Way the Human Brain Processes Certain Kinds of Information?
试验速览
- 阶段
- 不适用
- 状态
- 已完成
- 入组人数
- 100
- 试验地点
- 1
- 主要终点
- Performance in a facial expression recognition task
研究概览
简要总结
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.
详细描述
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:
研究设计
- 研究类型
- Interventional
- 分配方式
- Randomized
- 干预模型
- Parallel
- 主要目的
- Basic Science
- 盲法
- Triple (Participant, Care Provider, Investigator)
入排标准
- 年龄范围
- 18 Years 至 65 Years（Adult, Older Adult）
- 性别
- All
- 接受健康志愿者
- 是
入选标准
- •Female or male
- •Age: 18 to 65 years
- •Good general health
- •Competency to give informed consent
排除标准
- •Any current or past psychiatric disorder
- •Any first-degree relative with a diagnosis of schizophrenia-spectrum or other psychotic disorder, bipolar disorder, or depressive disorder
- •Regular engagement in mental exercises specifically aimed at improving cognitive abilities (concentration, attention, memory etc.), mood, or general well-being, such as (online) cognitive training, positive psychology exercises, regular meditation or mindfulness practices, yoga practices, or psychotherapeutic exercises.
- •Regular engagement in any of the exercises outlined above within the last 6 months.
- •Any severe medical condition not stabilized at the time of the study (e.g. asthma, heart disease, epilepsy)
- •Any current or past physical illness that has the potential to significantly affect mental functioning (e.g. stroke, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis)
- •Current intake of medication that has a significant potential to affect mental functioning, or intake of such medication in the previous 3 months (e.g. antidepressants, neuroleptics, tranquilizers)
- •Any intake of recreational drugs in the last 3 months before the experiment
- •Regular consumption of higher doses of alcohol (more than 2 pints of beer or equivalent on more than 3 days a week within the last month)
- •Any other reasons that preclude participants from full participation in the experiment (e.g. insufficient knowledge of English language)
- •Any other condition which can make participation in the study harmful for a participant, or which can severely compromise the quality of the data (e.g. low intellectual functioning)
研究组 & 干预措施
Three good things exercise
干预措施: Three good things exercise (Behavioral)
Unspecific childhood memory recall exercise
干预措施: Placebo exercise (Behavioral)
结局指标
主要结局
Performance in a facial expression recognition task
时间窗: Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started
Participants are presented with individual pictures of facial expressions of emotions. Each presented face displays one of six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or surprise). Each emotional expression is presented at different levels of intensity which have been created by combining shape and texture features of the two extremes "neutral" (0%) and "full prototypical emotion" (100%) to varying degrees. Examples of neutral facial expressions are presented as well. Participants are instructed to correctly classify each facial expression as angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, surprised or neutral both as quickly and as accurately as possible. Responses are made by pushing one out of seven labelled keys on a response box. Hit rates, false alarm rates, and reaction times for correct classifications are measured separately for each emotion.
次要结局
- Performance in an emotional categorisation task(Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started)
- Performance in an emotional faces dot probe task(Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started)
- Performance in an emotional recall task(Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started)
- Change in cortisol awakening response(Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started)
- Performance in an emotional recognition task(Completed at day 8 after exercise has been started)