NCT03957850

Cognitive Reappraisal in Adolescents With Major Depression

Cognitive Reappraisal in Adolescents With Major Depression: From Neurobiological Mechanisms to Intervention

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 71 (actual)
• Sponsor: Ludwig-Maximilians - University of Munich · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 12 Years – 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Major depression (MD) is common during adolescence and associated with significant morbidity and mortality. One important factor for the development and maintenance of adolescent MD are disturbances in emotion regulation, including deficits in cognitive reappraisal (CR). CR is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy that aims at reinterpreting emotional events to modify affective responses. Adolescents with MD apply this strategy less often than their healthy peers and show disturbances in brain activation patterns underlying CR. In this study, MD adolescents will be randomly assigned to a group that receives a task-based training in CR or to a control training group. It will be examined whether the task-based CR training is superior to the control training with regard to improvements in negative affect, perceived stress in daily life and depressive symptoms. Moreover, during the four training sessions, the event-related potential "Late Positive Potential" (LPP) will be recorded to assess neurophysiological indices of CR processes and gaze fixations on emotional areas within negative pictures and affective responses to pictures will be collected to identify mechanisms underlying training effects.This study will provide first evidence for the efficacy of a short-time training that has previously shown to be effective in healthy individuals. Moreover, the study will identify neurobiological mechanisms that predict training effects. The results of this investigation will lay the ground for a clinical trial to investigate whether a CR training added to an established intervention improves treatment effects for adolescent MD.

Conditions

• Major Depressive Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Cognitive Reappraisal Training	The training procedure is adapted from a study by Denny \& Ochsner (2014). Before the task, participants are instructed that they will be presented pictures and that these pictures will be preceded by a condition specific cue signaling the appropriate strategy during picture viewing. Participants are instructed to indicate their affective response to the image on a rating scale. The task involves 4 conditions: 1) Negative-decrease: participants are asked to view negative pictures and to decrease their affective response by reappraising the negative event. 2) Negative-attend/ 3) Neutral-attend/ 4) Positive-attend: participants are asked to view pictures and to respond naturally to them without trying to alter their affective response. The training task will be repeated over 4 training sessions.
BEHAVIORAL	Control Training	The task in the control group is implemented to account for unspecific effects and is as similar as possible to the CR task except that it involves no negative-decrease (i.e., no reappraisal) condition. Instead, the control task only involves the three attend conditions (negative- attend, neutral-attend, positive-attend).

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-05-27
• Primary completion: 2021-11-22
• Completion: 2021-11-22
• First posted: 2019-05-21
• Last updated: 2022-08-23

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Germany