Virtual Contexts for Affective Modulation

Part of paid clinical trials in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Sponsor
Trustees of Dartmouth College
Study ID
NCT06986122
Status
Recruiting
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Conditions

  • Anxiety
  • Memory
  • Pain Control

Eligibility Criteria

Sex
ALL
Age
18 Years - 55 Years
Healthy Volunteers
Accepted

Interventions

  • Pain Threat Manipulation — BEHAVIORAL
    Participants receive brief thermal pain stimuli in certain virtual environments to examine how threat influences perception and physiological responses.
  • Pain Controllability Manipulation — BEHAVIORAL
    In some contexts, participants can reduce or avoid pain using a button; in others, no action changes the outcome. This manipulation is used to study the effects of perceived control over pain.

Study Details

This study investigates how spatial context and perceived controllability modulate pain, affective states such as anxiety, and motivated behavior. The study examines how control over pain and threat-related environments influences pain perception, state anxiety, associated autonomic responses, and behavior. The main questions it aims to answer are: Does having control over pain within specific contexts alter how much pain people feel-even when the stimulus intensity remains constant? How do different types of environments (safe, controllable, or uncontrollable) shape pain-related brain activity, subjective anxiety, and physiological arousal? How do people perform cognitively demanding or distracting tasks (and retain their memory) when under threat versus when in control? Lastly, how do these learned associations with spatial contexts persist or adapt when environmental contingencies are explicitly changed? Taken together, exploration of these factors may lay the groundwork for understanding how placebo-related mechanisms-including perceived control, contextual learning, emotional engagement, and distraction-interact to shape pain and anxiety in complex environments.

Key Dates

Start date
Oct 28, 2025
Status verified
Oct 2025
Primary completion
Jun 15, 2027
Completion
Jun 15, 2029

Study Design

Enrollment
20 participants (estimated)
Allocation
NA
Intervention model
SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE

Arms

  • Experimental: Contextual learning
    All participants complete trials in three virtual contexts (safe, controllable threat, uncontrollable threat), with pain controllability and task performance assessed across all conditions in a randomized within-subject design.

Primary Outcome Measure

Pain Intensity Ratings [ Time Frame: 3-10 sec post-stimulus throughout testing sessions, on average complete within 1 month ]

Central Contacts

Locations (1)

FacilityCityStateZIPSite coordinators
Dartmouth CollegeHanoverNew Hampshire03755
Sydney Shohan

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