Cardiovascular Effects of Grieving

Part of paid clinical trials in Tampa, Florida.

Sponsor
University of South Florida
Study ID
NCT07356635
Status
Recruiting
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Conditions

  • Cardiovascular Health
  • Emotion
  • Grief

Eligibility Criteria

Sex
ALL
Age
18 Years - N/A
Healthy Volunteers
Accepted

Interventions

  • Value-affirmation — BEHAVIORAL
    Participants who are randomly assigned to the value-affirmation condition will be presented with 11 values and qualities to rank in order of importance from 1 to 11. Values presented including: being creative / artistic, government or politics, independence, learning and gaining knowledge, athletic ability, belonging to a group (such as your community, cultural group, or school club), music, career, spiritual or religious values, sense of humor. Participants will then be asked to write about their top-ranked value/quality and how it makes them feel good about themselves for 10 minutes.

Study Details

Self-affirmation (SA) theory proposes that people are motivated to maintain a positive self-image of being worthy, stable, and capable. Self-affirmation (SA) manipulations have been shown to effectively increase self-worth as well as reduce cardiovascular reactivity while enhancing cardiovascular recovery in response to stress. While SA is discussed as a way to alleviate grief, its effect on cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) and recovery to grief recall has yet to be studied within laboratory settings. This study proposes an experimental design to examine how an in-lab manipulation promoting self-affirmation can improve patients' cardiovascular responses during and after a grief recall procedure. The investigators hypothesized that grief severity (a continuous variable) interacts with condition (a categorical variable with two levels, i.e., SA intervention vs. control) to predict CV reactivity and recovery as outcomes. Primary Objective 1: To investigate effects of self-affirmation intervention on cardiovascular responses among grieving participants during and after grief recall. Secondary Objective 1: To investigate the relationship of grief severity with psychological stress.

Key Dates

Start date
Oct 16, 2025
Status verified
Jan 2026
Primary completion
Dec 31, 2026
Completion
Mar 31, 2027

Study Design

Enrollment
140 participants (estimated)
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Arms

  • Experimental: Grief-reducing intervention
    Participants will be randomly assigned to either a self-affirming task or a non-affirming neutral task prior to engaging in grief recall.
  • No Intervention: Control group
    Participants will be randomly assigned to either a self-affirming task or a non-affirming neutral task prior to engaging in grief recall. Participants in no-affirmation control group will be asked to rank their top 12 favorite jellybean flavors and write about the 3rd and 4th favorite flavor for 10 minutes. This control task has also been tested to propose same amount of workload without promoting participants' self-worth.

Primary Outcome Measure

Hypothesis 1: There will be a main effect of self-affirmation condition on CV reactivity and recovery to the grief recall task [ Time Frame: Two months after the last participant data collection. ]

Central Contacts

Locations (1)

FacilityCityStateZIPSite coordinators
University of South Florida, Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders Lab BuildingTampaFlorida33620
Kaiyuan Luo, BS, BA
[email protected]
412-708-9227

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University of South Florida, Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders Lab Building· Tampa, FL

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