Study of How Control and Virtual Environments Affect Pain, Anxiety, and Memory in Adults Aged 18 to 55

What this Trial Is About

Researchers are studying how different virtual spatial environments and the ability to control pain affect pain perception, anxiety, and motivated behavior. The study explores how people respond to pain and threat in safe, controllable, and uncontrollable contexts, focusing on how these factors influence brain activity, emotional states, and behavior. This work aims to understand placebo-related mechanisms such as perceived control, learning, emotional engagement, and distraction in shaping pain and anxiety. Participants will experience three virtual rooms one safe with no pain, one with controllable threat where they can use a button to reduce pain, and one with uncontrollable threat where pain cannot be avoided. They will navigate mazes in each room and perform tasks while receiving thermal pain stimuli in some contexts. The study includes multiple sessions involving pain calibration, virtual exploration, functional MRI scanning during tasks, extinction phases where pain is uncontrollable in all contexts, and reversal learning where threat conditions change. During the study, participants will provide pain and anxiety ratings, perform memory and navigational tasks, and have their autonomic responses measured via skin conductance, breathing, and heart rate. Brain activity is recorded using MRI while participants engage with the virtual environments and tasks. The study will assess how control and context affect pain perception, anxiety, memory, and behavior over repeated sessions lasting from about 1 to 2 hours each, with a total participation time spanning several sessions.

Virtual Contexts for Affective Modulation