My Life and My Experiences Project

NCT ID: NCT06821178

Last Updated: 2025-04-27

Basic Information

• Recruitment Status: RECRUITING
• Clinical Phase: NA
• Total Enrollment: 400 participants
• Study Classification: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Start Date: 2025-01-28
• Study Completion Date: 2028-06-30

Brief Summary

Child maltreatment is one of the most formidable public health crises in the United States, affecting millions of youth each year. The adverse consequences of maltreatment for youth, as well as for their families and entire communities, are pervasive, costly, and enduring. To intervene and reduce these consequences, it is imperative that victims provide clear and accurate accounts of their prior experiences. Currently, considerable skepticism exists regarding maltreated youth's ability to provide such accounts, especially for experiences that were stressful, leading to youths' reports being challenged or not believed. It is possible that this skepticism is unwarranted, and maltreated youth actually demonstrate better memory than their non-maltreated counterparts, but only for stressful salient personal experiences. This project will ethically and rigorously test this possibility via a short-term longitudinal experimental investigation that compares the effects of acute stress on memory between maltreated and demographically matched non-maltreated 12-17-year-olds. In an initial in-person session, youth will be randomly assigned (equal maltreated and non-maltreated youth across age) to complete standardized salient personal activities that are experimentally manipulated to vary in whether they induce higher or lower levels of acute stress. Immediately afterward, youth will complete an encoding task comprised of positive, negative, and neutral images. In subsequent sessions (two remote and one in person) spanning approximately one month, youth's memory will be tested for the images via a recognition task asking them to discriminate previously seen from unseen images and for the personal activities via recall and direct questions that probe for the extent and accuracy of memory. Youth's rumination about the personal activities will also be measured. The project's main hypothesis is that maltreatment will lead to particularly robust memory for the personal activities, but only when the youth complete these under conditions of high stress. By contrast, because the emotional and neutral images are not personally meaningful, maltreatment is expected to constrain youth's memory performance for the images. It is also hypothesized that rumination will serve as an important mediator of the links between stress and memory for the higher stress personal activities, most notably in the maltreated youth. Overall, the project's results will provide much-needed knowledge about the precise ways that maltreatment shapes different facets of youth's memory, knowledge. This knowledge will be enormously valuable in improving trust in maltreated youth's reporting of stressful experiences and hence in directing interventions for victimized youth.

Conditions

Stress and Memory in Adolescence

Study Design

• Allocation Method: RANDOMIZED
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Primary Study Purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE
• Blinding Strategy: SINGLE

Study Groups

High Stress Condition

High stress condition of Trier Social Stress Test - Modified

Group Type: EXPERIMENTAL

Acute stress manipulation

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

Youth will be randomly assigned to the HS (high stress) or LS (low stress) TSST-M condition. The objective activities will be identical in the HS and LS conditions but the context will vary. The HS condition will be highly evaluative. The researcher will tell youth that they are being videotaped in order to code their behaviors later. The observers will maintain neutral expressions, provide instructions in a neutral tone, and avoid eye contact. In the LS condition, evaluative components are removed \[31, 53\]. Observers will be introduced as new, and the videotaping will be explained as a check to ensure that the observers follow instructions. The observers will appear disorganized while giving instructions, smile, and maintain an open body posture and eye contact.

Low Stress Condition

Low stress condition of the Trier Social Stress Test-Modified

Group Type: EXPERIMENTAL

Acute stress manipulation

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

Youth will be randomly assigned to the HS (high stress) or LS (low stress) TSST-M condition. The objective activities will be identical in the HS and LS conditions but the context will vary. The HS condition will be highly evaluative. The researcher will tell youth that they are being videotaped in order to code their behaviors later. The observers will maintain neutral expressions, provide instructions in a neutral tone, and avoid eye contact. In the LS condition, evaluative components are removed \[31, 53\]. Observers will be introduced as new, and the videotaping will be explained as a check to ensure that the observers follow instructions. The observers will appear disorganized while giving instructions, smile, and maintain an open body posture and eye contact.

Interventions

Acute stress manipulation

Youth will be randomly assigned to the HS (high stress) or LS (low stress) TSST-M condition. The objective activities will be identical in the HS and LS conditions but the context will vary. The HS condition will be highly evaluative. The researcher will tell youth that they are being videotaped in order to code their behaviors later. The observers will maintain neutral expressions, provide instructions in a neutral tone, and avoid eye contact. In the LS condition, evaluative components are removed \[31, 53\]. Observers will be introduced as new, and the videotaping will be explained as a check to ensure that the observers follow instructions. The observers will appear disorganized while giving instructions, smile, and maintain an open body posture and eye contact.

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

Inclusion Criteria

Ages 12-17 at start, half self reported or documented prior contact with social services/dependency court; half always lived with at least one biological parent

Exclusion Criteria

Public speaking or math anxiety, cognitive impairments, head injuries, learning disabilities, steroid/hormonal treatments, or neuroendocrine diseases

• Minimum Eligible Age: 12 Years
• Maximum Eligible Age: 17 Years
• Eligible Sex: ALL
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Sponsors

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

NIH

Sponsor Role: collaborator

University of California, Irvine

OTHER

Sponsor Role: lead

Responsible Party

Jodi Quas

Professor

Responsibility Role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Locations

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, California, United States

Site Status: RECRUITING

Countries

United States

Central Contacts

Jodi A Quas, Ph.D.

Role: CONTACT

jquas@uci.edu

9498247693

Facility Contacts

Jodi A Quas, PhD

Role: primary

jquas@uci.edu

9498247693

Other Identifiers

R01HD113752

Identifier Type: NIH

Identifier Source: secondary_id

View Link

4715

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id