MedTrace Logo

The Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Motivation

NCT03677635 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 31

Last updated 2025-07-18

Study results available
· View outcomes & findings →

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 the participants will be asked to recall memories of events from their lives and the researcher will assess how detailed the memories are and how much the participant refers to the past and future. Alongside this task the participants 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 the investigators show that supporting memory recall is beneficial then memories for past events may be an important target for future therapies.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Guided Autobiographical Memory Recall

Participants are asked to recall positive autobiographical memories with the assistance of prompts to promote specificity, generalisability and links to the future. The participants will also view a 5min psychoeducation video on the subject of memory specificity and motivation.

Sponsors & Collaborators

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
65 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2017-05-18
Primary Completion
2018-03-31
Completion
2020-02-19

Countries

  • United Kingdom

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases
Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT03677635 on ClinicalTrials.gov