My Life and My Experiences Project
For patients and families
In plain language
An automatic summary of structured registry data. It is an orientation aid, not a substitute for the official protocol or a physician assessment.
- What is being studied
- The protocol lists: Acute stress manipulation.
- Who it may be relevant to
- Registry conditions: Stress and Memory in Adolescence. Basic parameters: 12 years — 18 years · All.
- What needs checking
- Age, condition and sex are only basic indicators. Prior treatment, laboratory values and other mandatory requirements appear in the eligibility criteria below.
- Where it takes place
- United States
- Next step
- Save the trial, show it to the treating physician, and confirm current recruitment with the study center. Costs, documents and travel →
Unsure about the terms? Read our patient guide →
Official title
Stress, Memory, and Rumination in Maltreated Adolescents
Overview
Child maltreatment is one of the most formidable public health crises in the United States, affecting millions of youth each year. The adverse consequences of maltreatment for youth, as well as for their families and entire communities, are pervasive, costly, and enduring. To intervene and reduce these consequences, it is imperative that victims provide clear and accurate accounts of their prior experiences. Currently, considerable skepticism exists regarding maltreated youth's ability to provide such accounts, especially for experiences that were stressful, leading to youths' reports being challenged or not believed. It is possible that this skepticism is unwarranted, and maltreated youth actually demonstrate better memory than their non-maltreated counterparts, but only for stressful salient personal experiences. This project will ethically and rigorously test this possibility via a short-term longitudinal experimental investigation that compares the effects of acute stress on memory between maltreated and demographically matched non-maltreated 12-18-year-olds. In an initial in-person session, youth will be randomly assigned (equal maltreated and non-maltreated youth across age) to complete standardized salient personal activities that are experimentally manipulated to vary in whether they induce higher or lower levels of acute stress. Immediately afterward, youth will complete an encoding task comprised of positive, negative, and neutral images. In subsequent sessions (two remote and one in person) spanning approximately one month, youth's memory will be tested for the images via a recognition task asking them to discriminate previously seen from unseen images and for the personal activities via recall and direct questions that probe for the extent and accuracy of memory. Youth's rumination about the personal activities will also be measured. The project's main hypothesis is that maltreatment will lead to particularly robust memory for the personal activities, but only when the youth complete these under conditions of high stress. By contrast, because the emotional and neutral images are not personally meaningful, maltreatment is expected to constrain youth's memory performance for the images. It is also hypothesized that rumination will serve as an important mediator of the links between stress and memory for the higher stress personal activities, most notably in the maltreated youth. Overall, the project's results will provide much-needed knowledge about the precise ways that maltreatment shapes different facets of youth's memory, knowledge. This knowledge will be enormously valuable in improving trust in maltreated youth's reporting of stressful experiences and hence in directing interventions for victimized youth.
Interventions
- Behavioral Acute stress manipulation
Youth will be randomly assigned to the HS (high stress) or LS (low stress) TSST-M condition. The objective activities will be identical in the HS and LS conditions but the context will vary. The HS condition will be highly evaluative. The researcher will tell youth that they are being videotaped in order to code their behaviors later. The observers will maintain neutral expressions, provide instructions in a neutral tone, and avoid eye contact. In the LS condition, evaluative components are remo
Primary outcome measures
- Delarative recognition memory [Time frame: 10 days from first session]
- Event Memory [Time frame: 30 days from first session]
Secondary outcome measures (1)
- State Rumination [Time frame: 10 days, 20 days, and 30 days from first session]
Eligibility criteria
Inclusion criteria
Ages 12-18 at start, half self reported or documented prior contact with social services/dependency court; half always lived with at least one biological parent
Exclusion criteria
Public speaking or math anxiety, cognitive impairments, head injuries, learning disabilities, steroid/hormonal treatments, or neuroendocrine diseases
Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.
Healthy volunteers: Yes
Study design
- Allocation
- Randomized
- Model
- Parallel assignment
- Masking
- Single blind
- Primary purpose
- Basic science
Study locations
United States · 1 center
- University of California, Irvine — Irvine
Identifiers
NCT: NCT06821178 · 4715 · R01HD113752