Induction of affective mentalizing to reduce anxiety-related stress in an online normal population sample. - Trial DRKS00028588

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Summary

Affective mentalization, i.e., the state of being able to experience one's own feelings and the feelings of others as understandable and controllable on the one hand and meaningful and useful on the other hand, which arises from a stable and secure interpersonal relationship, is understood in the recent mentalization literature as a possibility in the (self-)regulation of psychopathological symptoms. Concepts of the "third wave" such as mindfulness and mindfulness differ in this context especially with regard to the conceptual bonding-theoretical necessity in affective mentalization. In cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, we observed that affective mentalization is negatively related to anxiety-related fears in psychosomatic patient:s and longitudinally negatively predictive in normal population samples (in cross-lagged panel designs). Therefore, we aim to examine the effects of affective mentalization (independent variable) on anxiety-related stress (dependent variable) in a randomized 3 (Affective Mentalization vs. Active Control Group of Positive Fantasy vs. No Treatment) Beween subjects design on a US normal population online sample of Amazon's Mechanical Turk (targeted N of 84). As an intervention, participants will be asked to first idiosyncratically imagine a person who exhibits mentalizing characteristics (according to Bateman & Fonagy, 2016: "a person who has a genuine interest in your feelings and thoughts... who values your unique personality highly... who can easily take different perspectives... who is curious and non-judgmental... who is empathetic and sensitive... who is forgiving... who is at rest in oneself and self-reflective... who does not impute evil to others"). Then the subjects are asked to imagine the stress with an anxiety-related focus they are experiencing at the moment of the experiment and to write it idiosyncratically. Subsequently, they are asked to write how they think the imagined person reacts to this in a mentalizing way (i.e., the answer should be characterized by the fact that the imagined person is "genuinely interested in your feelings and thoughts, recognizes your confusing and perhaps conflicting feelings, knows that your feelings can influence your whole understanding of the world, helps you to discover, understand and reflect on your ways of thinking and seeing; knows that you become aware of your own changes and develop a deeper and more differentiated view of yourself and others"; Bateman & Fonagy, 2016). In the active control condition, subjects are asked to perform a mindfulness exercise and in the no-treatment condition to solve an irrelevant flanker task. We expect the Manipulation Check (assessing the response of the imagined person with mentalizing properties to the State anxiety-related stress in terms of mentalizing and attachment theory aspects) and the State anxiety-related stress (assessed using STAI and the "anxiety" subscale of the DASS-21 formulated in the State) to be least salient in the Affective mentalizing condition. If we were successful, this form of theoretically based intervention could also be applied to clinical subjects in follow-up studies.

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