Proactive Thought Control for Social Anxiety Relief

This study examines whether a proactive thought control intervention can reduce negative core beliefs, cognitive biases, and anxiety symptoms in university students with social anxiety. Participants with elevated social anxiety (screened via the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale) are randomly assigned to either a proactive thought control group or a reactive control group. Both groups complete two computerized tasks - a Free Association Task and a Sentence Completion Task - across 180 trials. The proactive group is trained to generate only positive or neutral associations to socially threatening cues and receives real-time AI-powered sentiment feedback, while the reactive group responds freely without sentiment-based guidance. Outcomes including negative core beliefs, interpretation bias, attentional bias, state anxiety, and trait anxiety are assessed before and after the intervention using standardized measures (CBQ, WSAP, Dot Probe Task, STAI). The study uses a parallel-group randomized controlled trial design with repeated measures and aims to establish preliminary effect size estimates for future, larger-scale trials.

NCT Number	NCT07562633
Lead Sponsor	GIFT University
Conditions	Social Anxiety Disorder
Enrollment	54 participants
Start Date	2025-04-20
Primary Completion	2025-05-30 (estimated)
Study Completion	2025-06-30 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2026-07-16