NCT03437317

Emotional Perceptual Training as a Treatment for Social Anxiety: Behavioral and Neural Evidence.

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 154 (actual)
• Sponsor: Florida State University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 35 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The Perceptual Training Study is a series of studies performed with the purpose of identifying a potential avenue for treatment of mood disorders, particularly anxiety-based mood disorders. The underlying theme is that neural representations may be threat-oriented, and may also be generalized to non-threatening cues by means of similarity to threatening representations. These may result in anxiety symptoms from innocuous cues. The idea behind the perceptual training is to create a divorce between the threat representations and cues which should be considered non-threatening, enhancing perceptual acuity and potentially reducing anxiety symptoms.

Conditions

• Anxiety Disorders and Symptoms
• Social Anxiety Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Perceptual Retraining	Participants viewed faces varying in their expression of anger and were asked to identify if the face was angry or neutral via button press. Participants were provided with feedback if their categorization of the face as neutral or angry was correct. Each participant was assigned 4 levels of angry faces based on their decision point of anger detection in faces. Faces were selected based on the closest existing anger morph to the category boundary; for example, a decision point of 40% anger was closest to the 38% anger face, and so the faces used would have been 17%, 31%, 45%, and 59% anger. For this example, responses of "neutral" to the 31% angry face would be marked as correct, whereas a similar response to the 45% angry face would be incorrect, as it was above their decision point.
BEHAVIORAL	Gender Discrimination	Participants viewed faces varying in their expression of anger and were asked to identify if the face was male or female via button press.

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-11-01
• Primary completion: 2016-12-15
• Completion: 2016-12-15
• First posted: 2018-02-19
• Last updated: 2018-02-19