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Virtual Contexts for Affective Modulation

NCT06986122 · Status: RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 20

Last updated 2025-10-31

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

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.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Pain Threat Manipulation

Participants receive brief thermal pain stimuli in certain virtual environments to examine how threat influences perception and physiological responses.

BEHAVIORAL

Pain Controllability Manipulation

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.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Trustees of Dartmouth College

    lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation
NA
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
NONE
Model
SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
55 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2025-10-28
Primary Completion
2027-06-15
Completion
2029-06-15

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

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 NCT06986122 on ClinicalTrials.gov