At a glance
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THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PROACTIVE THOUGHT CONTROL IN MODIFICATION OF NEGATIVE CORE BELIEFS AND COGNITIVE BIASES IN INDIVIDUAL WITH SOCIAL ANXIETY: A PILOT RCT STUDY
In Brief
A clinical study evaluating Proactive Thought Conrol and Reactive Thought Control for Social Anxiety Disorder. Completed, enrolled 54 participants across 1 site.
Detailed Summary
This study examines whether a proactive thought control intervention can reduce negative core beliefs, cognitive biases, and anxiety symptoms in university students with social anxiety. Participants with elevated social anxiety (screened via the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale) are randomly assigned to either a proactive thought control group or a reactive control group. Both groups complete two computerized tasks - a Free Association Task and a Sentence Completion Task - across 180 trials. The proactive group is trained to generate only positive or neutral associations to socially threatening cues and receives real-time AI-powered sentiment feedback, while the reactive group responds freely without sentiment-based guidance. Outcomes including negative core beliefs, interpretation bias, attentional bias, state anxiety, and trait anxiety are assessed before and after the intervention using standardized measures (CBQ, WSAP, Dot Probe Task, STAI). The study uses a parallel-group randomized controlled trial design with repeated measures and aims to establish preliminary effect size estimates for future, larger-scale trials.
Study Details
Timeline
Interventions
A computerized behavioral intervention delivered across 180 trials in six blocks. The first three blocks use a Free Association Task (FAT), where participants respond to single threatening or neutral word cues. The last three blocks use a Sentence Completion Task (SCT), where participants complete socially threatening or neutral sentence stems. Participants in the proactive group must generate positive or neutral single-word responses and cannot advance until doing so. Real-time sentiment feedback is delivered via DistilBERT (an AI language model), awarding +2 points for positive/neutral responses and providing corrective guidance for negative ones. The reactive control group completes identical tasks but responds freely, receiving only neutral quality-based feedback without sentiment reinforcement. Both groups receive feedback for repeated, misspelled, or invalid entries. Each block contains 25 threatening and 5 positive/neutral stimuli presented in randomized order.
A computerized behavioral sham condition delivered across 180 trials in six blocks, identical in structure to the experimental intervention. The first three blocks use a Free Association Task (FAT) and the last three use a Sentence Completion Task (SCT), both involving socially threatening and neutral stimuli. Participants respond freely with any single-word association without restriction on response valence. No sentiment-based feedback or scoring is provided. Participants receive only neutral quality-based feedback for repeated, misspelled, or invalid entries. This condition controls for nonspecific factors including task engagement, time-on-task, the Hawthorne effect, and demand characteristics, while isolating the active ingredient of proactive sentiment-directed training present in the experimental arm.