The relative efficacy of cognitive bias modification for interpretation or attention in social anxiety

Status

Not yet recruiting

Phases

Unknown

Study type

Interventional

Source

ANZCTR

Registry ID

ACTRN12616000598482

Acronym

n/a

Enrollment

120

Registered

2016-05-09

Start date

2016-05-16

Completion date

2016-08-31

Last updated

2020-01-13

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Conditions

None listed

Brief summary

This study will examine the relative efficacy of two variants of cognitive bias modification. these are two implicit training tasks (administered by computer), which train interpretation bias and attention bias. These two variants of CBM will be compared to each and then a combined version and a placebo group will also be included. The participants will complete the relevant training prior to a five minute social interaction task where they will be asked to describe why they are a good person. This will be videotaped. We predict that CBM-A will affect the social anxiety reported during the interaction task (rated immediately after the task), whereas CBM-I will affect the anxiety levels immediately after training. Further, we predict that the combined group will have improved outcomes overall (i.e. we predict an interaction effect between CBM-A and CBM-I.

Interventions

We will compare three active treatments: cognitive bias modification for attention (CBM-A), cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I) and a combined arm (i.e. CBM-AI). All treatments are given on one single occasion and matched for time. The tasks take approximately 20-30 minutes. All are administered on a computer. Cognitive bias modification of interpretation trains participants to interpret ambiguous sentences in a neutral manner by giving feedback that the sentences are not associated with a word that has salience for social threat. 496 trials are presented. Cognitive bias modification for attention involves implicitly training participants to attend to a non-threatening word by presenting word pairs (threat/neutral pairs) and consistently replacing the neutral (rather than threatening word) with a probe, Participants must identify the probe via key press as quickly as possible. There will be 640 trials. CBM-AI: combines both and in order to match the length of the intervention, the number of trials of each of the interventions is halved.

Study design

Allocation

Randomised controlled trial

Intervention model

Parallel

Primary purpose

Treatment

Masking

Blinded (masking used) (Subject, Caregiver, Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

All

Age

17 Years to No maximum

Healthy volunteers

Yes

Inclusion criteria

We will recruit participants who score one standard deviation above the average on the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale. Participants will be first year Psychology undergraduate students at the University of Sydney.

Exclusion criteria

Low levels of social anxiety

Outcome results