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Psychobiological Processes in Social Evaluation

NCT05107609 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 37

Last updated 2024-08-28

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Higher-weight individuals face pervasive weight-related stigma and discrimination in their daily lives. There is conceptual and empirical evidence to suggest that weight stigma contributes to worse physical and psychological health outcomes, mediated by the deleterious psychobiological responses to psychosocial stress. Activating self-soothing emotional states (such as self-compassion) may protect against this psychobiological cascade, conferring resilience to negative social evaluation (such as weight stigma). This proof-of-concept study aims to establish the feasibility of an experimental protocol testing whether an acute self-compassion intervention can attenuate the psychobiological stress response to induced weight-based social-evaluative threat. Participants will be randomized into either self-compassion intervention or rest control groups. A standard body composition assessment will be used to induce weight stigma among young women who self-identify as "higher-weight." Stress-sensitive biomarkers (i.e., salivary cortisol and heart-rate variability) along with psychological indices of self-conscious emotions will be used to quantify the psychobiological stress response. This novel pilot study will contribute to efforts to understand the psychobiological processes by which self-compassion facilitates adaptive responding to acute stress, and will help inform future tests of interventions focused on mitigating the harmful health effects of social stigma.

Conditions

  • Stigma, Social
  • Weight, Body
  • Compassion
  • Stress Reaction

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Acute Self-Compassion Intervention

Participants will be guided through a 30-minute behavioural self-compassion intervention that seeks to mitigate their psychobiological responses to the subsequent weight stigma induction. The intervention is intended to induce a flexible self-compassionate mindset that will facilitate more adaptive psychological responding to stress and activate affiliative/self-soothing physiological systems that can dampen psychobiological stress reactivity. This acute self-compassion intervention will employ a multimodal, experiential approach that is regularly utilized in self-compassion training, drawing from approaches developed in Compassion-Focused Therapy and Mindful Self-Compassion.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Western University, Canada

    lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
34 Years
Sex
FEMALE
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2021-11-01
Primary Completion
2023-02-01
Completion
2023-12-01

Countries

  • Canada

Study Locations

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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 NCT05107609 on ClinicalTrials.gov