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Completed

NCT Number: NCT03551041

The Neural Representation of Self in Depression Patients

To be aware of oneself as a unique entity in the world occurs early in human development and is the prerequisite of normal social functioning. The disturbance of self representation characterizes a variety of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Negative self-bias was found to serve as the core cognitive mechanism of depression disorder. However, there was no evidence to show the reason lead to negative bias. In the current study, investigators hypothesized that the blurring self representation was the neural correlates in depression disorder.

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Key information

Conditions

Depression Disorder Behavior Behavioral Symptoms Depression Healthy

Age range

18 year–60 year

Sex eligibility

All sexes

Study type

Observational

About this study

To test investigators' hypothesis, investigators adopted the self-referential task and fMRI to investigate the neural representation of self in depression patients, and compared with healthy control.

Who can participate

Healthy volunteers accepted: Yes

Only the study team can determine whether someone qualifies for participation.

Inclusion criteria

  • Patients should be clinical diagnosis of major depression disorder.
  • Healthy control participants should be age-matched with depression group, and should have no history of neurological or psychiatric diagnoses

Exclusion criteria

  • Patients who also have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder
  • Healthy controls who have history of mental disorders

Treatment and study plan

Primary outcomes

  1. Neural representation of self

    Time frame: through study completion, an average of 2 year

    We adopted the self referential task. In the task, participants were asked to judge whether a given word was appropriate to describe oneself (self-judgement condition), a celebrity (other-judgement condition) by pressing one of the two buttons with the index or middle finger. For judgments of each target person (i.e, self and celebrity), there were 3 categories of words describing the mental (personality traits, such as hard-working, friendly), physical (physical attributes, such as black hair, big eyes) and social (social roles, such as student, American) dimension of person knowledge. The fMRI task contained 6 runs, with 4.6 minutes per run.

    This paradigm and task allowed us to investigated the neural representation of self by comparing the BOLD activity under self-judgement condition with BOLD activity under other-judgement condition.

Sponsors and collaborators

Lead sponsor

Beijing Normal University

Other

Collaborators

  • Peking University
  • Southwest Medical University

Registry information

Official study title

The Different Neural Representation of Self in Depression Patients and Healthy Individuals.

Important dates

Study start
2014
Primary completion
2017
Study completion
2018
First posted
Jun 11, 2018
Registry last updated
Jun 11, 2018

OpenTrials presents study information sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov. The official registry record should be consulted for the latest information.

View the official ClinicalTrials.gov record (opens in a new tab)

This listing is for discovery and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, does not guarantee that a study is recruiting, and does not determine eligibility. Contact the study team and a qualified healthcare professional when considering participation.

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