Active clinical trials for "Depression"

Attention control for external information and cognitive control for internal information play a causal role in emotion regulation according to different theories and empirical research. Former research in the lab of the investigators has shown positive effects of an interactive attention control/interpretation training, in which participants learned to unscramble scrambled sentences ("life is my a party mess") in a positive way ("my life is a party") by getting eye-tracking feedback about attention for positive ("party") vs. negative information ("mess"). After the training, participants could better reinterpret negative photos in a positive way. Attention- and cognitive control mechanisms prior to negative stressors (proactive control) and after negative stressors (reactive control) seem to play a role in this. Moreover, research has shown that low perceived control and negative expectations about future emotion regulation skills results in lower proactive control and a higher need of reactive control. Based on this, the assumption can be made that the effects of attention control training - targeting reactive control - could benefit from adding techniques that affect proactive control (e.g. psycho-education). In the present study this is investigated by testing a new two weeks attention control training to see if this has a positive effect on stress related complaints, depressive symptoms and emotion regulation. Given that the current COVID-19 pandemic is perceived as very stressful by a lot of people, the training could help here. Participants between 18 to 65 years of age are recruited during this corona crisis. The attention control training is a new smartphone based application. Participants have to unscramble scrambled sentences into grammatically correct sentences. In the training condition, participants are asked to unscramble the scrambled sentences in a positive way. By swiping, participants can see part of the sentences. This gives the investigators an image about the processing of the sentences. This procedure allows to measure how long participants attend to positive and negative words. In the training condition participants get feedback about the duration they process positive and negative words. In the control group participants unscramble the sentences as fast as possible without feedback on emotional attention. Participants only get feedback about the speed at which sentences are unscrambled. Before and after the 10 training sessions, attention of the participants is measured to see the effects of the training. Questionnaires on depressive and anxiety complaints, emotion regulation strategies, well-being and stress are administered before and after the training. There is also a follow-up measure 2 months after the training. Both groups (training and control) watch a psycho-education video before the start of the training.

Anxious depression is a particularly difficult-to-treat subtype of depression. Patients with anxious depression do not respond as well to currently available antidepressant medications. Nevertheless, in previous studies, low dose IV ketamine, which rapidly decreases symptoms of depression within hours in many patients with "treatment-resistant" depression, has been associated with superior efficacy in those individuals with anxious compared with non-anxious depression. In order to understand this unique effect more fully, the current protocol is aimed at further delineating biomarkers of ketamine's effects among individuals with treatment-resistant anxious depression compared to those with nonanxious depression.

This randomized clinical trial studies iPad use in reducing anxiety and depression in patients undergoing bone marrow transplant. A tablet device like the iPad can provide access to music, television, movies, books, and the Internet. It also contains a video conferencing system that can allow patients to communicate with family members and other members of their social support team. With these capabilities, an iPad distribution program may help lessen patient anxiety and depression during a hospital stay. Monitoring iPad use by patients may help doctors better understand how patients use their computers and tablets while in the hospital so that the software and applications of the iPad can be made more useful.

The aim of this study is to determine if a hospital-based antenatal yoga program (HB-AYP) is a feasible, acceptable and potentially efficacious intervention for women with antenatal anxiety and/or depression?

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of nutraceutical supplement on depressed mood and anhedonia in volunteers after 8 weeks of consumption.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a prevalent disorder. Studying the factors related to PPD will help to identify families at risk and provide preventive interventions. This can in turn improve the developmental trajectories for the children. Several previous studies have investigated risk factors for PPD. However, few studies have focused on cognitive vulnerability factors. The first aim of the present study is to explore a range of protective and risk factors, including cognitive factors, for PPD, parent-infant interactions and child development. The second aim of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of The Newborn Behavioral Observation (NBO) as a universal preventive intervention delivered in routine practice. The NBO is a brief relationship-enhancing intervention that may reduce depressive symptomatology in mothers.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of the EnBrace HR prenatal supplement in preventing depression in women with a history of depression who have decided to stop taking antidepressants during their pregnancy, or treating women who are currently in a depressive episode while pregnant or planning pregnancy.

The purpose of this pilot study is to test the effectiveness of French adaptation of the Blues program, a school-based indicated depression prevention intervention. The program will be delivered by the endogenous psycho-social staff of 3 Montreal secondary schools to adolescents with sub-clinical depressive symptoms and compared to a no-intervention (Informational Brochure only) control condition, designed to represent the "usual intervention" in these schools.

Symptoms of anxiety and depression are common in adolescents and young adults with chronic illnesses and are associated with decreased adherence to medical regimens. However, many young patients go untreated for anxiety and depression. The purpose of this study is to evaluate an online cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program in young adults with chronic illness. Prior research has shown online CBT to be effective in multiple other populations, but to the investigators' knowledge, this is the first study to examine web-based CBT for young adults with chronic illnesses.

Selective biases in attention can be modified by a simple computerized technique: The Attention Bias Modification Task (ABM) pioneered by MacLeod et al. Cognitive biases may be one reason depression recurs, and altering these biases should reduce risk of recurrence. Recently, evidence has supported this hypothesis . The mechanisms by which ABM works are not well understood. More research is needed to explore how altering an implicit attentional bias can lead to changes in subjective mood. One possible explanation is that positive attentional biases are an important component of explicit methods of emotion regulation. The ability to effectively regulate one's emotions is a fundamental component of mental health and this ability is impaired in depression. It has also been shown that recovered depressed people spontaneously show a more dysfunctional pattern of emotion regulation as compared to never depressed controls. Supporting this, growing evidence implicates dysregulation of a medial/orbitofrontal circuit in mood disorders. This circuit includes the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, the ventral striatum, the ventral pallidum and medial thalamus. Components of this circuit are reciprocally connected with the amygdala, which is implicated in emotional processing in the healthy brain and dysregulated in depression. Negative emotion processing biases depend on both enhanced "bottom-up" responses to emotionally salient stimuli and reduces "top-down" cognitive control mechanisms, required to suppress responses to emotionally salient but task irrelevant information. Cognitive reappraisal and distancing are common strategies to down- or upregulate emotional responses. Reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves reinterpretation and changing the way one thinks about an event or stimulus with the goal of changing its affective impact. Distancing is a type of reappraisal that involves creating mental space between oneself and the emotional event in order to see things from a different, less self-focused perspective. It has been shown that distancing is a strategy that people can improve at over time compared to reinterpretation. The neural systems which support the explicit regulation of emotion have previously been characterized and include both lateral- and prefrontal cortex. This frontal activity is predicted to downregulate limbic circuitry involving the amygdala during passive viewing of emotional salient stimuli.