The Neural Mechanisms of Imaginal Extinction

Uppsala University

Status

Completed

Conditions

Fear of Spiders

Treatments

Behavioral: Threat conditioning

Behavioral: Imaginal extinction

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT05168592

2020-06930b

Details and patient eligibility

About

Imaginal exposure is a widely used and effective psychological treatment technique in which patients are exposed to fearful stimuli and situations using mental imagery. This study examines imaginal extinction, an experimental analogue of imaginal exposure that allows the study of this treatment technique under controlled circumstances. During imaginal extinction, conditioned fear is diminished through repeated exposure to mental imagery of the feared (conditioned) stimulus. The neural underpinnings of imaginal extinction is not known, and hence, this study examines neural activations during imaginal extinction using psychophysiology and brain imaging.

Full description

In this study, participants undergo threat conditioning to two pictures (CS+, CS-) in order to acquire a conditioned threat response. After this, the conditioned threat response is diminished through imaginal extinction (i.e extinction to the mental imagery of CS+ and CS-). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (7T) is used to measure neural activations during threat conditioning and imaginal extinction. Skin conductance is used to measure arousal response. Subjective fear and mental imagery vividness ratings will also be collected. In this way, this study aims to characterize the neural underpinnings of imaginal extinction.

Note that this study employs participants fearful of spiders. This is because data collection is shared with a related study (ClinicalTrials.gov ID 2020-06930a).

Enrollment

87 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 60 years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Willing and able to provide informed consent and complete study procedures
Fear of spiders (due to data collection together with ID 2020-06930a)

Exclusion criteria

Current psychiatric disorder other than spider phobia. Current use of psychotropic medication. Current neurological conditions. MRI-contraindications (i.e metal implants in skull).