Recruiting

Pain & Anxiety

Sponsor:

Trustees of Dartmouth College

Code:

NCT06986122

Conditions

Pain Control

Anxiety

Memory

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 18 - 55

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

Interventions

Pain Threat Manipulation

Pain Controllability Manipulation

Study Details

Brief summary:

This study investigates how spatial context and perceived controllability modulate pain, affective states such as anxiety, and motivated behavior. The study examines how control over pain and threat-related environments influences pain perception, state anxiety, associated autonomic responses, and behavior. The main questions it aims to answer are:

Does having control over pain within specific contexts alter how much pain people feel-even when the stimulus intensity remains constant? How do different types of environments (safe, controllable, or uncontrollable) shape pain-related brain activity, subjective anxiety, and physiological arousal? How do people perform cognitively demanding or distracting tasks (and retain their memory) when under threat versus when in control? Lastly, how do these learned associations with spatial contexts persist or adapt when environmental contingencies are explicitly changed?

Taken together, exploration of these factors may lay the groundwork for understanding how placebo-related mechanisms-including perceived control, contextual learning, emotional engagement, and distraction-interact to shape pain and anxiety in complex environments.

Conditions

Pain Control

Anxiety

Memory

Study ID

NCT06986122

Start date

Oct 28, 2025

Status verified date

Oct, 2025

Completion date

Jun 15, 2029

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Jun 15, 2027

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 18 - 55

Healthy Volunteers: Accepted

  • No self-reported current or history of depression, bipolar disorder, or other psychiatric diagnosis
  • No self-reported current seizure disorder (i.e., seizure within past 10 years), or history of stroke or other major neurological diagnosis
  • No self-reported current chronic pain, or acute pain within three months of the study period
  • No current migraine disorder (i.e., 15 headache days or more in 1 month)
  • No use of central nervous system-effective medication or other medication for neurological/psychiatric treatment
  • No self-reported substance abuse within the last six months
  • No contraindication to MRI (e.g., pregnancy, claustrophobia, pacemakers, ear/cochlear implants, shrapnel injuries, clips, or other ferromagnetic/electrical objects/devices, diagnosed brain abnormality such as tumor, or skin lesions on the scalp.)
  • No contraindications for induced pain (e.g., no heart disease, high blood pressure, heart surgery, heart problems of any kind, severe asthma, respiratory problems of any kind, fibromyalgia, Raynaud's Syndrome or Disease, chronic pain, diabetes)
  • Participants must be capable of performing experimental tasks (e.g., are able to read), are fluent or native speakers of English
  • Participants must be able to tolerate the maximum level of thermal pain stimuli (for thermal stimuli)

Study Design

Enrollment

20 participants

Anticipated

Intervention Model

Single group

Primary purpose

Basic Science

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

experimental: Contextual learning

All participants complete trials in three virtual contexts (safe, controllable threat, uncontrollable threat), with pain controllability and task performance assessed across all conditions in a randomized within-subject design.

Interventions

Pain Threat Manipulation

Participants receive brief thermal pain stimuli in certain virtual environments to examine how threat influences perception and physiological responses.

Pain Controllability Manipulation

In some contexts, participants can reduce or avoid pain using a button; in others, no action changes the outcome. This manipulation is used to study the effects of perceived control over pain.

Primary outcome measure

  • Pain Intensity Ratings [ Time Frame: 3-10 sec post-stimulus throughout testing sessions, on average complete within 1 month ]
  • Self-Reported Anxiety Ratings [ Time Frame: Every 45-60 sec throughout testing sessions, on average complete within 1 month ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Central contacts

Tor D Wager, PhD

3038958739tor.d.wager@dartmouth.edu

Vivek Sagar, PhD

vivek.sagar@dartmouth.edu

Locations

Dartmouth College

Recruiting

Hanover, New Hampshire, United States, 03755

More Information

Sponsor

Trustees of Dartmouth College

Last update posted

Oct 31, 2025

Last verified

Oct, 2025

Keywords

  • Place conditioning
  • controllability of pain

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-09-10. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by Trustees of Dartmouth College on 2025-10-31.