Clinical trial NCT03677635: The Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Motivation
Official title: Is There a Relationship Between Memory for Past Events and Motivation for Future Activities?
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Psychosis
Keywords: Negative Symptoms
Autobiographical Memory
Lead sponsor: King's College London
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2018-09-19
Enrollment: 40
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 65
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: People with a diagnosis of psychosis often experience low motivation and pleasure when thinking about doing future activities. This leads, quite understandably, to doing fewer activities they used to enjoy and not taking up opportunities to do new activities. One model suggests that this may be partly due to difficulties using memories of previous events to help boost motivation and anticipation before a future activity. Research shows that people with psychosis may recall previous events in less detail. These memories therefore may not be as helpful as they could be for motivation. This study will investigate this by asking people with experience of psychosis and low motivation who are seen by a care team in South London and Maudsley NHS Trust to attend two research sessions. In the first session they will be asked to recall memories of events from their lives and the researcher will assess how detailed they are and how much they refer to the past and future. Alongside this task people will also be asked to complete measures of symptoms such as low pleasure and motivation as well as a measure of depression. These will be used to find out if the detail and specificity of the memories are related to these symptoms in people with psychosis. The second half of the study will then investigate whether additional prompts to support positive memory retrieval can increase the specificity of this and subsequently improve mood, motivation and self-belief. Participants will be randomised to one of two groups. The clinical group will be guided through their memory recall using prompts and a control group will be asked to recall positive memories without prompts. If we show that supporting memory recall is beneficial then memories for past events may be an important target for future therapies.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* A diagnosis of non-affective psychosis (as determined by medical records).
* Above 18yrs old.
* A score of at least 18 on the Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms.
* A sufficient command of the English language to engage with the research materials

Exclusion Criteria:

* Lack of capacity to provide informed consent.
* Primary diagnosis of intellectual disability, head injury, substance misuse or known organic cause of psychosis

Primary outcomes:
measure: Change in Motivation
timeFrame: Immediately before and after completing the intervention (20mins apart)
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Change in Anticipatory Pleasure
timeFrame: Immediately before and after completing the intervention (20mins apart)
measure: Change in Self-efficacy
timeFrame: Immediately before and after completing the intervention (20mins apart)
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: London
country: United Kingdom
facility: South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
city: London
country: United Kingdom
facility: Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, KCL
Study officials:
References: