NCT03487081

Neural Predictors of Social Emotion Regulation Training

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 62 (actual)
• Sponsor: Columbia University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 35 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to investigate the basic psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the social regulation of emotion - that is, how one person's actions can impact, or regulate - the emotions of another person - and how this ability changes with practice. As such, this study is not designed to directly address clinical health outcomes and provide no treatment or intervention.

Detailed description

Prior research has demonstrated that helping others regulate their emotions has benefits for the support provider. But little is known about the basic brain mechanisms underlying this ability or how this ability can change with practice. To address these questions, this study has two parts. In the first, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to gain insight into the brain systems involved in helping others regulate negative emotions by comparing them to the brain systems involved in regulating the participants' own negative emotions. In the second part, participants engage in three weeks of structured practice, or training, in either socially regulating others' emotions or in self-regulating their own emotions. The investigators predict that helping others regulate their emotions will involve many of the same brain regions implicated in regulating one's own emotions, in addition to regions involved in perspective taking and the reward of helping others. Further, when relating the brain data from part 1 to the regulation practice data from part 2, the investigators expect that individuals who in part 1 show greater activity in brain regions supporting either social or self-regulation may be more likely in part 2 to show corresponding improvements in regulation performance. The results of these studies are intended to lay the groundwork for future studies investigating the social regulation of emotion in older adults and clinical populations for whom social support can be beneficial.

Conditions

• Emotions
• Rumination

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Social regulation	Participants will be instructed to help another person think about their negative events differently using an emotion regulation strategy called reappraisal.
BEHAVIORAL	Self regulation	Participants will be instructed to think about their negative events by reframing the meaning of the event. This is a typical strategy in emotion regulation research known as reappraisal.

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-07-02
• Primary completion: 2019-02-11
• Completion: 2019-02-11
• First posted: 2018-04-03
• Last updated: 2020-01-23

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States