Neural Account of Social Placebo Effect

NCT03891459 | Completed

• 1 other identifier: FSPE
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 68
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

The current study aimed to reveal the neural mechanism of social placebo belief formation and belief representation, and also investigated how the brain pattern predict the social behavior performance under placebo manipulation.

Conditions

Spray+ Group; Control Group

Keywords

social placebo effect; fMRI; neural account

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (3)

• The brain functional connectivity

  For functional connectivity estimation, we adopted DLPFC, mPFC and reward related brain regions as the seeds to do whole-brain connectivity analysis. And the conducted two-sample T test to examine whether there would be some differences between spray+ and control groups.

  8 mins, 240 TR in scanner

• Social brain network properties in resting-state

  For the network properties, we chose the social brain network as our target and interested network, then estimated the global efficiency within this network.And the conducted two-sample T test to examine whether there would be some differences between spray+ and control groups.

  8 mins, 240 TR in scanner

• The brain response pattern for the key concepts about oxytocin

  We estimated the beta response trial by trial for each single concept and then investigated the neural representation of all concepts by using representational similarity analysis (RSA).

  5.33mins, 160TR in scanner

Study Arms (2)

spray+ group

EXPERIMENTAL

In spray+ condition, participants learned oxytocin materials on a self-paced basis and then intranasally administered with saline (but it was told as "oxytocin"). Participants were instructed to refrain from smoking or drinking (except water) for 2 h before the experiment. The spray was administered to each participant three times, and each administration consisted of one inhalation into each nostril. Participants took a rest (they were told it was a time period waiting for treatment to produce effects) for 10min and then performed the experimental tasks.

Behavioral: spray+ manipulation

control group

PLACEBO COMPARATOR

In control condition, the materials and procedure were same with the spray+ condition except the nasal spray was told as "saline" instead. Oxytocin materials used in current experiments were adopted from previous study

Behavioral: control manipulation

Interventions

spray+ manipulation BEHAVIORAL

Participants in spray+ group received placebo manipulation and were told they sprayed was oxytocin (in fact, it was saline);

spray+ group

control manipulation BEHAVIORAL

Participants in control group were told they sprayed saline (in fact, it was saline).

control group

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years - 35 Years
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64)

You may qualify if:

• All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and mental healthy.

You may not qualify if:

• Participants who reported no history of neurological, endocrine or psychiatric disorders, who majored in psychology in college or recently participated in any other drug study were not recruited.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Beijing Normal University: lead

Study Sites (1)

Beijing Normal University

Beijing, Beijing Municipality, 100000, China

Location

MeSH Terms

Interventions

Behavior Control

Intervention Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Therapeutics; Behavioral Disciplines and Activities

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: DOUBLE
• Who Masked: INVESTIGATOR, OUTCOMES ASSESSOR
• Purpose: BASIC SCIENCE
• Intervention Model: CROSSOVER
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Principal Investigator

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: March 17, 2019
• First Posted: March 27, 2019
• Study Start: June 27, 2018
• Primary Completion: November 2, 2018
• Study Completion: November 5, 2018
• Last Updated: March 27, 2019

Record last verified: 2019-03

Locations

CN (1)