Clinical trial NCT06821178: My Life and My Experiences Project
Official title: Stress, Memory, and Rumination in Maltreated Adolescents
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: RECRUITING
Phase: NA
Conditions: Stress and Memory in Adolescence
Lead sponsor: University of California, Irvine
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
First posted: 2025-02-11
Enrollment: 400
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 12
Maximum age (years): 17
Standard ages: CHILD
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: Child maltreatment is one of the most formidable public health crises in the United States, affecting millions of youth each year. The adverse consequences of maltreatment for youth, as well as for their families and entire communities, are pervasive, costly, and enduring. To intervene and reduce these consequences, it is imperative that victims provide clear and accurate accounts of their prior experiences. Currently, considerable skepticism exists regarding maltreated youth's ability to provide such accounts, especially for experiences that were stressful, leading to youths' reports being challenged or not believed. It is possible that this skepticism is unwarranted, and maltreated youth actually demonstrate better memory than their non-maltreated counterparts, but only for stressful salient personal experiences. This project will ethically and rigorously test this possibility via a short-term longitudinal experimental investigation that compares the effects of acute stress on memory between maltreated and demographically matched non-maltreated 12-17-year-olds. In an initial in-person session, youth will be randomly assigned (equal maltreated and non-maltreated youth across age) to complete standardized salient personal activities that are experimentally manipulated to vary in whether they induce higher or lower levels of acute stress. Immediately afterward, youth will complete an encoding task comprised of positive, negative, and neutral images. In subsequent sessions (two remote and one in person) spanning approximately one month, youth's memory will be tested for the images via a recognition task asking them to discriminate previously seen from unseen images and for the personal activities via recall and direct questions that probe for the extent and accuracy of memory. Youth's rumination about the personal activities will also be measured. The project's main hypothesis is that maltreatment will lead to particularly robust memory for the personal activities, but only when the youth complete these under conditions of high stress. By contrast, because the emotional and neutral images are not personally meaningful, maltreatment is expected to constrain youth's memory performance for the images. It is also hypothesized that rumination will serve as an important mediator of the links between stress and memory for the higher stress personal activities, most notably in the maltreated youth. Overall, the project's results will provide much-needed knowledge about the precise ways that maltreatment shapes different facets of youth's memory, knowledge. This knowledge will be enormously valuable in improving trust in maltreated youth's reporting of stressful experiences and hence in directing interventions for victimized youth.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

Ages 12-17 at start, half self reported or documented prior contact with social services/dependency court; half always lived with at least one biological parent

Exclusion Criteria:

Public speaking or math anxiety, cognitive impairments, head injuries, learning disabilities, steroid/hormonal treatments, or neuroendocrine diseases

Primary outcomes:
measure: Delarative recognition memory
timeFrame: 10 days from first session
measure: Event Memory
timeFrame: 30 days from first session
Secondary outcomes:
measure: State Rumination
timeFrame: 10 days, 20 days, and 30 days from first session
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Irvine
country: United States
facility: University of California, Irvine
state: California
Study officials:
References: