A Phase 1/2 interventional study of Escitalopram 10mg and Placebo 10 mg in Effort Based Decision Making, Prosocial Behavior and Apathy, sponsored by University of Oxford. Not yet recruiting. Open to participants aged 18 Years to 40 Years, including healthy volunteers. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2024-11-20.
Sponsored by University of Oxford · Phase 1/2, Interventional, and Treatment
The aim of this study is to investigate the behavioural effects and neural correlates of increasing serotonin levels in healthy volunteers, through a 7-day course of the SSRI escitalopram, on an effort-based decision-making task measuring self-benefiting and prosocial behaviours.
This study investigates the mechanisms behind motivation and apathy, focusing on how effort is dedicated to both self-benefiting and prosocial actions. Diminished motivation, often manifesting as apathy, is associated with poor health outcomes and is common in neurological disorders like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and small vessel cerebrovascular disease (SVD). While brain regions like the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and anterior insula (AI) are known to regulate motivation in reward-based decision-making for personal gain, prosocial motivation remains underexplored. Prosocial behaviour involves actions that benefit others and contribute to physical and psychological well-being. Recent studies suggest unique neural activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg) during prosocial actions, differing from self-benefiting behaviour.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior evidence on how SSRIs might influence prosocial motivation or its neural correlates. This study will address this gap by examining SSRI effects on effort-based prosocial decision-making, potentially identifying novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying motivation for prosocial behaviour.
University of Oxford is the lead sponsor of 794 studies on the registry; 117 are open to participants now.
Counted across the registry records on this site, refreshed daily.
Exclusion Criteria:
Escitalopram tablets 10 mg once daily for 7 days
Drug: Escitalopram 10mg
Lactose tablets 10 mg once daily for 7 days
Drug: Placebo 10 mg
Escitalopram 10 mg, encapsulated in an opaque capsule to facilitate blinding of participant and researcher
Placebo 10 mg, encapsulated in an opaque capsule to facilitate blinding of participant and researcher
Effort-based decision-making task for self-benefiting and prosocial behaviours: behavioural correlates
In the fMRI scanner task, participants are prompted to choose between two offers on each trial. One option allows them to earn a low reward for minimal effort (rest), while the other presents a variable higher-reward, higher-effort (work) of the same duration. The low-reward, low-effort offer earns 1 point without exertion. Higher-reward, higher-effort offers range from 2 to 10 points (in 2-point-increments) and effort varies from 30% to 70% (in 10% increments) of their MVC. Each trial differs in whether the outcome is delivered to the participant themselves (self) or someone else (prosocial). Effort levels for each offer are visually represented using coloured portions of a pie chart and rewards (points) are displayed in colour below.
Time frame: Day 7 of treatment
Effort-based decision-making for self-benefiting and prosocial behaviours: Neural correlates
Activity of brain regions associated with self-benefiting and prosocial behaviours
Time frame: Day 7 of treatment
Emotional processing: Faces task
During the emotional processing face task participants will be presented with pictures of emotional faces and asked to label the emotions into different categories.
Time frame: Day 7 of treatment
Prosocial behaviour: Social learning task
This game involves making fictitious investment decisions with other "previous participants in our lab" (programmed responses) and trying to maximize the number of points earned in the game.
Time frame: Day 7 of treatment
No study locations are listed for this record.
Plan to share: Undecided — Research data will be anonymised and then processed for analysis. Anonymised data will be made available post-publication on Open Science Framework (OSF). we plan to share normalised MRI data (such that unique brain structure is not shared) into an online scientific data sharing repository such as 'Zenodo'
No publications or documents are linked to this record.
This study is not yet recruiting, as verified in Nov 2024. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.
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University of Oxford