The current study examines the efficacy of a cognitive training intervention for improving emotion regulation in psychotic disorders. it is hypothesized that the cognitive training program will enhance prefrontal activation, leading to enhanced emotion regulation.
Psychotic disorders are serious and debilitating mental illnesses that incur substantial suffering for patients and present major challenges to our health care system. Difficulties with emotion regulation (i.e., the ability to control the emotion response using strategies) significantly predict the development and maintenance of psychotic symptoms and poor community-based functional outcomes. Recent neuroimaging research indicates that hypofrontality may underlie these deficits. Unfortunately, there is no accepted technique for remediating these emotion regulation abnormalities in psychotic disorders. Recent advances from the field of cognitive neuroscience provide hope for a resolution to this critical unmet need in psychotic disorder therapeutics, demonstrating that brief computerized cognitive training interventions are capable of improving emotion regulation ability by targeting neural activation in the prefrontal cortex. The goal of the proposed project is to determine whether an emotional working memory cognitive training program is effective for remediating emotion regulation abnormalities and associated clinical outcomes in people with psychotic disorders. Outpatients with psychotic disorders will be randomly assigned to either an emotional working memory training (n = 35) or placebo (P: n = 35) cognitive training control intervention delivered via an app on a smart phone for 30 days. The primary aim is to determine whether the emotional working memory intervention successfully engages the target mechanism and enhances prefrontal activation on a non-trained emotion regulation transfer task beyond a pre-specified effect size criterion. Results will also be used to determine the treatment duration (15 vs. 30 days) that most effectively and efficiently improves the target.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE
Enrollment
70
Participants will complete an emotional working memory n-back training program that progressively increases difficulty and has been shown to enhance prefrontal activity in a non-psychiatric sample
Working memory training that does not involve emotional stimuli using an N-back training program
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia, United States
RECRUITINGPrefrontal blood oxygen level dependent activation in the prefrontal cortex
blood oxygen level dependent change in the prefrontal cortex as measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This will be calculated as a change from baseline to follow-up on the contrast score (unpleasant passive viewing condition - reappraisal) on the emotion regulation reappraisal task
Time frame: Change from baseline to 15 days or 30 days
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