The Effect of Emotional Working Memory Training on Reducing Depressive Symptoms

Hunan Normal University

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Depressive Symptoms

Treatments: Behavioral: Working memory training; Behavioral: Positive ABMT

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04346771

EMOTION 2019

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to test whether emotional working memory training and attention bias modification training are an effective neurobehavioral therapy to improve depressive symptoms.That is whether emotional working memory training is superior to attention bias modification training or not in reducing depressive symptoms over 1 year after training.

Full description

Attentional bias has been theorized to play a critical role in the onset and maintenance of depression. Attentional bias modification training (ABMT), an experimental paradigm that uses training to induce adaptive attentional bias, was developed to test the causal model and this has therapeutic implications in depression.To test the effect of ABMT on treatment of depressive symptoms, a randomized, double-blind, placebo and blank controlled trial is conducted in college students who are experiencing mild-to-severe symptoms of depression.

Enrollment: 31 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 16 to 21 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Meet the major and mild depression disorder's criteria

Exclusion criteria

bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or organic mental disorder; any concurrent psychotherapy; any concurrent psychotropic medication.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Triple Blind

---

31 participants in 2 patient groups, including a placebo group

Maintaining Positive Working memory

Experimental group

Description:

Maintaining positive working memory training is based on visual positive works n-back task.In this training, positive words are presented on the pictures of happy face.According to the rules, subjects are required to identify whether the word present currently is as the same type as the word presented n before then click the keys correspondingly.Each training session contains 15 blocks which are consisted with 20+n trails.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Working memory training

Positive Attention Bias Modification

Placebo Comparator group

Description:

In the positive attention bias, there are 54 pairs of neutral-negative words, 27 pairs of which are used in the training group and 27 pairs of which are used in the placebo group. The word pairs in each group are repeated 8 times, with a total of 216 trial.Participants received 10 sessions over 2 weeks. 90% of the targets in the training group appear in the positive word position and 10% of the targets appear in the neutral word position.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Positive ABMT