Effects of a Brief Mental Exercise on Emotional Processing
Condition: Emotional Processing; Mental Exercise
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      The aim of this study is to explore whether a brief mental exercise (developed and widely
      advocated in the field of positive psychology) can change the processing of emotion-related
      information in a similar way as previously observed for antidepressant drugs. Healthy
      volunteers are randomly allocated to a 7-day practice of the "Three Good Things" (TGT)
      exercise or a previously used placebo exercise (unspecified childhood memory recall) with
      study participants as well as investigators being blind as to which practice is conducted.
      After a 7-day practice period, all study participants undergo testing with the Oxford
      Emotional Test Battery, an established battery of cognitive tasks that allow to assess how
      emotional information is processed. The working hypothesis of the study is that the TGT
      exercise, as compared to the placebo exercise, can push the processing of emotional
      information towards a prioritisation of positive (relative to negative) input.
    

Detailed description: 
      Background and objective:

      Previous research indicates that various physiological treatments for depression (especially
      antidepressant drugs) can induce positive biases in emotional information processing and it
      has been suggested that this might be a crucial common mechanism through which they exert
      their clinical effects. This study aims to investigate whether similar positive biases can
      also be induced by a brief mental exercise (developed and widely used within the field of
      positive psychology) that has previously been shown to have antidepressant and/or
      happiness-enhancing effects.

      Methods:

      Using a double-blind, parallel-group design, 100 healthy volunteers (male and female) are
      randomly allocated to a 7-day mental exercise practice conducting either the widely reported
      Three Good Things (TGT) exercise or a previously established placebo condition (unspecific
      childhood memory recall). After 7 days of practice, all participants undergo testing with the
      Oxford Emotional Test Battery in order to assess emotional information processing in
      different cognitive domains. This battery consists of a facial expression recognition task,
      an emotional categorization task, an emotional dot probe task, an emotional recall task and
      an emotional recognition task. In addition, prior to and immediately after the 7-day practice
      period salivary cortisol awakening response and subjective state (using various
      questionnaires) is assessed.

      Hypotheses:

      The working hypothesis of the study is that, similar to physiological antidepressant
      interventions, the TGT exercise (as compared to the placebo exercise) might induce biases
      towards positive stimuli in multiple cognitive domains.

      Implications of the study:

      This study will show whether engaging in a simple mental exercise can alter emotional
      information processing in a similar way as previously observed for antidepressant drugs and
      other physiological interventions.
    

Intervention name(s): Three good things exercise; Placebo exercise
Intervention type(s): Behavioral; Behavioral
Intervention description(s): Participants are asked to remember each evening three things that went well during their day and to write them down in a journal including a short explanation of why they think each of them has happened.; Participants are asked to briefly recall a childhood memory (no further specification) and to write it down including a short explanation why they think it has happened.
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Triple (Participant, Care Provider, Investigator)
Primary purpose: Basic Science
Keywords: Emotion; Cognition; Positive psychology