An interventional study of AI-Proactive thought control and Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), sponsored by Farah Shahzadi. Completed at 1 site in Pakistan. Open to participants aged 18 Years to 26 Years. Per ClinicalTrials.gov, last updated 2026-09-09.
Sponsored by Farah Shahzadi · Not applicable, Interventional, and Treatment
Participants with Social Anxiety Disorder will be recruited from educational settings . After screening and informed consent, participants will be randomly assigned to PTC , ACG or CBT .The therapy session will be 8 session once a week, and data will be collected through psychological questionnaires in two phases at start and end of intervention.
368 studies on the registry are indexed under Phobia, Social; 59 are open to participants now.
This study's enrollment of 75 is close to the median of 76 across 339 interventional studies indexed under Phobia, Social.
Browse Phobia, Social studies →This is the only study on the registry with Farah Shahzadi as lead sponsor.
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Exclusion Criteria:
Underlined terms in the criteria open these too. Explained by clinicaltrials.gg, not part of the registry record. The study team decides who can take part.
The American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental health diagnoses. DSM-5 (2013, revised as DSM-5-TR in 2022) replaced DSM-IV, and some studies still name the older edition. “Meets DSM criteria for …” means diagnosed by that edition’s diagnostic criteria, usually by a clinician in an interview.
Judged by the study doctor to matter for your health or for the study. It is a doctor’s decision, so ask the study team if you are unsure whether something counts.
Before you join, the study team explains what taking part involves — its purpose, what happens, the risks and possible benefits — and answers your questions, so you can decide freely. Consent is usually recorded on a form (the informed consent form, ICF) signed by you or, where the law allows, by someone legally authorised to decide for you.
You can keep asking questions during the study, you are told of new information that matters, and you can choose to leave at any time.
DSM diagnostic criteria
The American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental health diagnoses. DSM-5 (2013, revised as DSM-5-TR in 2022) replaced DSM-IV, and some studies still name the older edition. “Meets DSM criteria for …” means diagnosed by that edition’s diagnostic criteria, usually by a clinician in an interview.
Explained by clinicaltrials.gg, not part of the registry record. The study team decides who can take part.
Clinically significant
Judged by the study doctor to matter for your health or for the study. It is a doctor’s decision, so ask the study team if you are unsure whether something counts.
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Informed consent
Before you join, the study team explains what taking part involves — its purpose, what happens, the risks and possible benefits — and answers your questions, so you can decide freely. Consent is usually recorded on a form (the informed consent form, ICF) signed by you or, where the law allows, by someone legally authorised to decide for you.
You can keep asking questions during the study, you are told of new information that matters, and you can choose to leave at any time.
Explained by clinicaltrials.gg, not part of the registry record. The study team decides who can take part.
The PTC (Proactive Thought Control) arm an AI-integrated, computerized intervention that trains proactive thought control, the anticipatory maintenance of a positive goal representation used to override an automatically primed negative response before it is produced (Braver, 2012). Across eight sessions, each pairing a Free Association Task (single-word cues) with a Sentence Completion Task (unfinished social-evaluative stems).
Other: AI-Proactive thought control
The CBT group served as the gold-standard comparison condition, receiving an eight-session, individually delivered cognitive-behavioral protocol adapted from the empirically supported treatment of Hope, Heimberg, and Turk (2019). To fit the study's fixed eight-session frame, it followed the manual's accelerated outline, compressing the standard sixteen-to-twenty-session course while still covering most relevant workbook chapters in order.
Other: Cognitive Behavior Therapy
The Active Control group was a structurally and temporally matched, computerized active comparison condition that removed the intervention's active ingredient while preserving every non-specific feature. Participants completed the same two tasks (Free Association and Sentence Completion), the same cue/stem material, same three blocks of 30 trials per session (720 across eight sessions), same self-paced presentation, practice trials, on-screen appearance, and time on task, so the two conditions were equated on stimuli, dose, feedback salience, and engagement. The key difference was the omission of the proactive-thought-control contingency.
Other: Active Control
The two paired tasks Free Association Task (FAT) and Sentence Completion Task (SCT) form the core of the AI-integrated Proactive Thought Control (PTC) program. FAT shows a social-threat word and the participant types the first associated word, training proactive control at the lexical level; SCT then gives unfinished social-evaluative stems to complete with a benign word, extending the override to the propositional level. Both run three blocks of thirty self-paced trials per session (720 over two weeks), so every threat trial forces a positive, cue-relevant representation that overrides a primed negative associate before advancing. AI integration relies on real-time validation: SiEBERT scores sentiment and MiniLM embedding confirm semantic relevance, enforcing a positive, cue-relevant construal each trial. Feedback reinforces this accepted responses earn points, rejected one prompt revision, and the threshold relaxes after four failures and pass after eight.
8-session CBT protocol ( Hope, Heimberg \& Turk, 2019 manual) The CBT arm received an eight-session protocol moving from psychoeducation and the three-component model of social anxiety with an individualized Fear and Avoidance Hierarchy (Sessions 1-2), through cognitive restructuring using disputing questions from automatic thought to rational response (Sessions 3-4), to repeated graded exposure using role-plays, distress ratings, and added cognitive tools, with the final session offering core-belief work and setting post-treatment maintenance goals (Sessions 5-8)
Participants did the same two tasks as the experimental group. The Free Association Task and the Sentence Completion Task , matched on stimuli, format, and time. The key difference was that the control removed the core training element: responses were not checked for meaning against the cue, and about half of the negative answers were accepted without correction, so the link between a threat cue and forcing a positive response was broken. In short, the control group did the same tasks and got the same exposure, but without the active thinking-training component.
Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self Report
Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self-Report; range 0-144; higher = worse (greater social anxiety severity)
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Core Belief Questionnaire (CBQ)
Core Belief Questionnaire-Self-Trait and -Other (17 items each, 6-point Likert); range 17-102 if items are scored 1-6; higher = more strongly endorsed negative core beliefs (worse)".
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Dot Probe task
milliseconds; more positive = stronger bias toward social threat
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
word sentence association paradigm
higher = more threat-relevant interpretation bias
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Behavioral Avoidance Task
SUDS 0-100; higher = more subjective distress
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
beck depression inventory II
range 0-63; higher = worse
Time frame: Baseline (Day 1, before the first session) and Post-Intervention (within 7 days after the eighth session; the 8 sessions are delivered a weekly over a 8-week period
Plan to share: Undecided
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Ran from Mar 2026 to primary completion in Aug 2026, 4 months.
Of 142 non-industry interventional studies with no phase under Phobia, Social, half reached primary completion within 28 months of starting (the median), counting those still running; a quarter within 15 and three quarters within 44. This study's 4 months is below that.
Counting every sponsor, half of 148 studies reached it within 28 months; a quarter within 14 and three quarters within 43.
How these figures are worked out, and which studies are left out of them.
This study is completed, as verified in Sep 2026. You cannot join it, but the record below documents what was studied.
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