ClinicalTrials.gg
WithdrawnNCT03471689Updated Jun 5, 2019

Multisensory Integration and Pain Perception

An interventional study of Mindfulness meditation and Positive reappraisal in Pain and Regulation, Self, sponsored by Wake Forest University Health Sciences. Withdrawn at 1 site in United States. Open to participants aged 18 Years to 23 Years, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2019-06-05.

Sponsored by Wake Forest University Health Sciences · Not applicable, Interventional, and Basic science

Why this study was withdrawn
Resources

From the registry’s dates

  • Registered 4 months after the study started (first participant enrolled Nov 2017, registered Mar 2018).
Phase
Not applicable
Study type
Interventional
Enrollment
0
Allocation
Randomized
Ages
18 Years to 23 Years
Sex
All
01

Study summary

Pain is a predominant disruption of well-being among humans. Feeling pain is a multimodal sensory experience where information is collected and processed from various senses such as sight and touch. Because pain is complex, variable, and experienced differently by each individual, finding more accessible and practical treatments for pain are necessary. Mindfulness meditation (MM) aims to reduce pain by directing focus to perceive thoughts through non-judgmental awareness. Positive reappraisal (PR) is a possible cognitive pain treatment that focuses on changing the meaning of stressful or negative events into positive, benign, valuable, or beneficial. When a stressful event, such as experiencing pain, is positively reappraised, the individual recognizes and engages with the feeling of stress produced by the event and intentionally looks for benefits that change the feeling from negative to positive. The focus of this study is to examine the effect of different cognitive techniques on multimodal innocuous and noxious stimuli. Visual and tactile noxious stimuli will be administered to determine how visual cue integrate to form and modulate the subjective experience of pain. The study team postulates that mindfulness meditation and positive reappraisal will significantly reduce pain in response to multimodal stimulus (visual cue + noxious heat) when compared to a non-manipulation control condition. These findings will be utilized to better understand the multidimensional mechanisms supporting nociception and the cognitive modulation of pain.

02

Conditions studied

  • Pain
  • Regulation, Self

Keywords

  • Multimodal
  • Pain perception
  • Regulation
  • Mindfulness
03

In context

Pain

10,054 studies on the registry are indexed under Pain; 1,649 are open to participants now.

Browse Pain studies →

Lead sponsor

Wake Forest University Health Sciences is the lead sponsor of 1,351 studies on the registry; 201 are open to participants now.

Of its 332 completed or terminated interventional studies of FDA-regulated products, 251 (76%) have results posted.

Counted across the registry records on this site, refreshed daily.

04

Who can participate

Ages eligible
18 Years to 23 Years
Sexes eligible
All
Accepts healthy volunteers
Yes

Go through the criteria one by one — yes, no or not sure — and take the list to your doctor or the study team. Kept in this browser only.

Inclusion criteria

  • Native/fluent English speaker
  • Ability to understand/willingness to sign consent form

Exclusion criteria

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Chronic pain
  • Cardiac medications
  • Diagnosis of mental illness or personality disorder
  • Diagnosis of heart or lung conditions/hyper tension
  • Taking psychiatric medications
05

Study design

Phase
Not applicable
Primary purpose
Basic science
Allocation
Randomized
Intervention model
Parallel assignment
Masking
None (open label)
Enrollment
0 participants (actual)

Study arms

  • Experimental
    Mindfulness

    Behavioral: Mindfulness meditation

  • Active comparator
    Positive reappraisal

    Behavioral: Positive reappraisal

Interventions

  • BehavioralMindfulness meditation

    Participants will be trained to use mindfulness meditation to reduce pain perception.

  • BehavioralPositive reappraisal

    Participants will be trained to use positive reappraisal to reduce pain perception.

06

What researchers measure

Primary outcomes

  1. Psychophysical Assessment of Pain

    Pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings will be assessed with the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). If the participant states that he or she "is in no pain" or the pain "is not at all unpleasant," a rating of 0 will be recorded for pain intensity and unpleasantness, respectively. The maximum rating of "10" will designate the "most intense pain imaginable/the most unpleasant pain imaginable".

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  2. Assessment of Physiologic Measurements

    Participants may be fitted with electrocardiography (ECG) sensors and a respiratory belt that is placed around the participant's chest. Subjects may also be fitted with sensors that measure electrodermal activity. All physiological activity will be recorded at a rate of 1 kHz and will be processed with an integrated software system. Respiratory rate will be calculated in breaths per minute. ECG sensors will be placed on the lower right and left ribs of the participant. Respiration belt will be attached to the upper chest, and two 6 mm Ag/AgCl skin conductance electrodes will be placed on the distal phalanges of the first and second fingers of the non-dominant hand. Higher scores reflect more physiological arousal to pain stimuli.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  3. Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) (Short Form)

    This 14-item form assesses self- attributed mindfulness. The inventory is composed of 14 items that use a 1 to 4 Likert scale. Obtaining a higher score represents higher mindfulness.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  4. Ways of Coping Scale (WOCS-PR; Positive Reappraisal Subscale)

    The 7-item form assesses levels of positive reappraisal. The WOCS- Positive Reappraisal Subscale has a total of seven questions. It uses a Likert scale ranging from 0 to 3 and asks the participant to think of a specific stressful situation. High scores on the PR subscale represent frequent use by the individual of positive reappraisal for stressful events.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  5. State Anxiety Inventory (SAI)

    This 20-item scale is commonly used to measure state anxiety and has internal consistency, construct validity, and test-retest reliability. A score between 20 and 80 is given, with higher scores representing higher levels of anxiety.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  6. Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS)

    This 13-item form assesses rumination, magnification, and helplessness, attributes used in the literature to define pain catastrophizing. Each item is given a score from 0 to 4. The total scores range from 0 to 52, with higher ratings representing higher levels of catastrophic thinking.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  7. Positive and Negative Affective Scale (PANAS)

    This scale measures general affective states by assessing a subject's experience of 20 different emotions. This scale is scored on a 5-point scale, with higher scores for the positive questions representing higher levels of positive affect, and higher scores for the negative questions representing higher levels of negative affect.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  8. Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)

    This scale is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory for measuring the severity of depression, and it has internal consistency, construct validity, and test-retest reliability. There is a total of 21 questions with a Likert scale ranging from 0 to 3. Higher scores represent higher levels of depression.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  9. Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)

    This is a psychological instrument for measuring participant's perception of stress. It has internal consistency, construct validity, and test-retest reliability. There is a total of 10 questions with higher scores denoting higher levels of perceived stress.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  10. VAS of Analgesia

    Participants will be asked to indicate, by using the visual analog scale, how much pain they will expect to experience. If the participant states that he or she "will experience no pain" or the pain "will not be unpleasant," a rating of 0 will be recorded for pain intensity and unpleasantness, respectively. The maximum rating of "10" will designate the "most intense pain imaginable/the most unpleasant pain imaginable".

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  11. VAS of Political Affiliation

    Using the VAS, participants will indicate where in the political spectrum they identify. Participants will be instructed that the right side of the VAS corresponds to conservatism while the left corresponds to liberalism. Participants will move the sliding scale on the VAS to the location corresponding to their political affiliation.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  12. VAS of Stress

    Participants will indicate with the VAS how stressed, from a scale of 0-10, they are at the present moment. A rating of 0 will be recorded for "no stress" while a rating of 10 will be recorded for "highest" stress possible.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

  13. Valence Ratings for Images

    : Participants for phase one will rate the images based on the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) valence ratings. The ratings will use a Likert scale ranging from 1 (low pleasantness) to 9 (high pleasantness). After the participants look at the image for 2 seconds, they will be asked to rate level of pleasantness in less than 5 seconds based on the immediate feeling experienced while viewing the image.

    Time frame: throughout study completion, up to 2 hours

07

Study locations

1 site
  • Wake Forest University
    Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109, United States
08

References and documents

Individual participant data

Plan to share: No

No publications or documents are linked to this record.

09

Timeline

Tracking since Sep 25, 2026
ElapsedEstimatedEstimated, not yet reached

Started Nov 2017 (actual). Primary completion is estimated for May 2019, 18 months after the start.

How these figures are worked out, and which studies are left out of them.

Registered
Mar 12, 2018
First posted
Mar 20, 2018
StartActual
Nov 8, 2017
Primary completionEst.
May 2019
CompletionEst.
May 2019
Last update
Jun 5, 2019
What these dates mean
Start.
When the first participant enrolled; while estimated, when the study expects to open to recruitment.
Primary completion.
When the last participant was examined or treated to collect data for the study's main question, its primary outcome. A study that stopped early gives the date its data collection stopped.
Completion.
When the last participant's last visit took place, for every outcome, secondary ones and side effects included: the end of the study. Often later than primary completion, sometimes the same day.
Actual and Est.
Actual means the registry says the date has happened. Est. (estimated) is a date the sponsor plans or expects. It can still move, and the sponsor is expected to change it to actual once it has passed.
No changes since tracking began. The registry record was last updated on Jun 5, 2019, before this site started recording changes on Sep 25, 2026. Its history is on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗
10

Registry details

Key details

Study ID
NCT03471689
Responsible party
Sponsor
First posted
Mar 20, 2018
Start date
Nov 8, 2017
Primary completion
May 2019 (estimated)
Completion
May 2019 (estimated)
Last update
Jun 5, 2019

Study contacts

Christian Waugh, PhD
principal investigator · Wake Forest University
Fadel Zeidan, PhD
principal investigator · Wake Forest University Health Science

Oversight

Data monitoring committee
No
FDA-regulated drug
No
FDA-regulated device
No
View the source record on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗

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