Investigating Attention Patterns in Young People With Anxiety (ATTN-ANX)

King's College London

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Anxiety; Adolescent Behavior

Treatments: Behavioral: Control Training; Behavioral: Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Training

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03546946

225926

Details and patient eligibility

About

Adolescents with elevated anxiety have been found to direct their voluntary and involuntary attention more readily toward threatening stimuli, and spend more time dwelling upon that stimuli. Various computerised tasks have been developed to attempt to retrain these "attention biases" back away from threat.

This study will test a newly developed intervention, that uses (eye-tracking) methods to track the gaze of the individual. This intervention is called Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Training (GC-MRT), and is designed to re-train the individual away from dwelling upon threatening stimuli (emotional faces), using their favourite music to re-infornce this learning.

Enrollment: 99 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 12 to 18 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• 12-18 years of age upon study commencement
• Diagnosed generalised or social anxiety disorder (assessed by SCID)
• Informed written and witnessed consent

Exclusion criteria

• Psychosis
• Autism
• Learning difficulties
• Uncorrected abnormal vision
• Current use of SSRIs

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Factorial Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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99 participants in 3 patient groups, including a placebo group

Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Training

Experimental group

Description:

GCMRT for eight 20-minute sessions - twice per week over 4 weeks.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Training

Control Training

Placebo Comparator group

Description:

Passive viewing task with continuous music for eight 20-minute sessions - twice per week over 4 weeks.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Control Training

No-Train Group

No Intervention group

Description:

No active training.