NCT03012035

The Role of Treatment Expectation in Exposure Training With Spider Fearful Participants

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 70 (actual)
• Sponsor: University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study evaluates the role of treatment success expectation in spider fearful individuals on the actual treatment success. Half of participants will have positive treatment success expectations, while the other half will have neutral treatment outcome expectations.

Detailed description

The investigator plan to conduct a randomized, single blind study with two parallel groups. Both groups undergo the same standardized psychotherapeutic intervention, i.e. exposure training. All participants will receive the same exposure training in groups of maximum three participants of the same study group. The two study groups only differ regarding the induced treatment expectations towards the effects of the exposure training. While the experimental group will get an open administration of treatment and be informed in order to have a positive treatment expectation, the comparator group will receive a hidden administration of treatment and get neutral information, thus treatment expectations will be neutral. Study members conducting the exposure training with the participants will not be aware of the allocation of the study participants. Study participants will be informed about the aim of the allocated condition, but they will be blind to the aim of the study in order to induce the specific expectation. Differences in treatment outcomes are compared between both groups to investigate the association with treatment expectation.

Conditions

• Phobic Disorders

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	positive treatment expectations	Before participants undergo the exposure training their expectation of treatment efficacy is manipulated with different information regarding the following treatment. The experimental group will get positive treatment expectations induced with the accurate information, that exposure training refers to the gold standard in psychotherapy to reduce spider fear (= open administration of treatment).
OTHER	neutral treatment expectations	The comparator group will get neutral expectations regarding treatment outcome. To induce neutral treatment expectations about the following exposure training, it is necessary to tell them they are in the comparator group and that they will receive a comparator condition exposure training for diagnostic purposes only (= hidden administration of treatment).

Timeline

• Start date: 2017-05-18
• Primary completion: 2018-03-12
• Completion: 2018-03-12
• First posted: 2017-01-06
• Last updated: 2018-03-21

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland