NCT03872414

Emotion Study/Substudy: Flexible Brain Study

Emotion Study (Improving Neural Dysregulation in Advanced Age: A Neurofeedback Approach)/Substudy: Flexible Brain Study

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 46 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Florida · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 100 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The proposed research applies the highly innovative technology of real-time functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtfMRI) to examine plasticity of brain-regulatory mechanisms related to cognitive and affective processing and to determine benefits for cognition and affect in young and older adults and in Parkinson Disease (PD) patients.

Detailed description

There is increasing evidence that age-related alterations in brain function associated with affective processing and attention contribute to these motivational and emotional changes with age. Based on these theoretical considerations as well as the previous study's data, the proposed research will apply well-tested emotion processing and attention paradigms to address the pivotal question of whether brain activity can be modulated in healthy aging and PD (in the substudy) via contingent rt-fMRI neurofeedback and whether this neuroregulatory modulation increases emotion processing and cognitive performance.

Conditions

• Aging
• Emotions
• Parkinson Disease

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Anterior cingulate cortex activation	Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Participants in the experimental group will be trained using functional magnetic resonance imaging to regulation brain activity in anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex is a brain region that is known to be involved in emotion processing. Activation of this region is expected to improve emotion processing.
BEHAVIORAL	Primary auditory cortex activation	Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Participants in each group will be trained using functional magnetic resonance imaging to regulation brain activity in primary auditory cortex. The primary auditory cortex is a brain region that is NOT specifically involved in emotion processing. Activation of this region is NOT expected to improve emotion processing; and thus activation of this brain region serves as "control/placebo" condition in the current design (placebo comparator).

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-04-01
• Primary completion: 2023-05-08
• Completion: 2023-05-08
• First posted: 2019-03-13
• Last updated: 2023-05-17

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States