NCT06022432

Overcoming Treatment Barriers

Overcoming Treatment Barriers: The Role of Expectations in the Behavioral Intention of Treatment Seeking for Social Anxiety

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 171 (actual)
• Sponsor: Philipps University Marburg · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 75 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study aims to assess whether negative or rather the lack of positive treatment expectations could be positively influenced by online short interventions and increase intention so seek treatment and actual help-seeking behavior when compared to a no-treatment control group. Further, the study investigators like to explore if specifically focusing on intensifying positive treatment expectations vs. a reduction of expectations about negative treatment effects will influence the pattern of results differently.

Detailed description

The investigators expect that participants receiving an intervention e.g., amplifying positive (performance) expectancies vs. reducing negative (performance) expectancies of psychotherapeutic treatment, will show an increase in intentions to seek treatment and are more likely to report actual treatment-seeking behavior after the intervention when compared with participants who will describe their treatment expectations via a writing task. Further, the investigators want to explore if the expectancy-modulating interventions will differently affect the intention to seek treatment within socially anxious individuals. If participants agree, the investigators plan to assess changes in expectations, attitudes as well as actual treatment seeking behavior at a Follow-Up assessment one week later (data from Follow-Up will be analyzed exploratively and is not part of the main hypotheses).

Conditions

• Health Care Utilization
• Health Care Seeking Behavior

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Video of a patients testimonial	The intervention is a prerecorded video of a re-enacted patient-therapist interaction whereby the patient gives a testimonial about the treatment process while either reducing negative expectations or maximizing positive expectations about therapy, respectively.
OTHER	Writing Task	Participants write freely about their current treatment expectations / apprehensions to seek treatment

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-03-17
• Primary completion: 2024-02-15
• Completion: 2024-06-13
• First posted: 2023-09-01
• Last updated: 2025-07-10

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Germany