NCT05294809

Psychological Mobile Interventions to Reduce Distress

Effectiveness and Mechanisms of Change of Two Mobile Psychological Interventions in Reducing Depressive, Anxiety and Stress Symptoms: PsyPills and Online-Contingent Attention Training (OCAT)

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 450 (actual)
• Sponsor: Babes-Bolyai University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Investigating the effectiveness of two mobile psychological interventions and the mechanisms of change involved in reducing the symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, on an adult population with a mild to moderate level of symptoms (sub-clinical).

Detailed description

The research design will be a 3-arm controlled clinical trial, with 4 waves of data collection. Once selected using a symptomatic screening questionnaire, participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 2 experimental conditions (PsyPills and OCAT) and an active control group (shamOCAT). Measurements will be collected before allocation (baseline), during the intervention (through a momentary ecological assessment paradigm), at the end (post) and at an interval of one month after the intervention (follow-up). Among the constructs evaluated are symptomatic level, affectivity, cognitive processes, emotional regulation and attentional bias. All measurement steps will be collected online. The interventions consist of an attentional training (Online-Contingent Attention Training, OCAT) which seeks to facilitate the disengagement from the negative content and the engagement on the positive of some personally relevant information by providing instructions and feedback on performance; and prescribing personalized rational thinking strategies to change the intensity of dysfunctional emotionality (PsyPills). The active control group consists of a "fake" version of OCAT (shamOCAT), by offering the same attentional training, without training and feedback on performance. All interventions are delivered in the form of smartphone applications.

Conditions

• Psychological Distress

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	PsyPills	Prescribing personalized rational thinking strategies to change levels of dysfunctional emotionality.
BEHAVIORAL	Online-Contingent Attention Training, OCAT	Facilitating the disengagement from negative content and engagement of positive one of personally relevant information by providing instruction and feedback on performance.
BEHAVIORAL	shamOCAT	The active control group, which consists of the "fake" version of the OCAT intervention, by offering the same attentional training, without training and feedback on performance.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-06-12
• Primary completion: 2023-10-29
• Completion: 2023-10-29
• First posted: 2022-03-24
• Last updated: 2025-02-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Romania