--- title: Effects of Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion nct_id: NCT07393776 overall_status: COMPLETED phase: NA sponsor: Texas Tech University study_type: INTERVENTIONAL primary_condition: Intervention Group countries: United States canonical_url: "https://parkinsonspathways.com/agent/trials/NCT07393776.md" clinicaltrials_gov: "https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07393776" ct_last_update_post_date: 2026-02-06 last_seen_at: "2026-05-12T06:01:43.850Z" source: ClinicalTrials.gov (mirrored, no enrichment) --- # Effects of Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion **Official Title:** Effects of a Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion After Watching a Traumatic Event: Randomized Controlled Experimental Study **NCT ID:** [NCT07393776](https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07393776) ## Key Facts - **Status:** COMPLETED - **Phase:** NA - **Study Type:** INTERVENTIONAL - **Target Enrollment:** 156 - **Lead Sponsor:** Texas Tech University - **Conditions:** Intervention Group, Comparison Group, Control Group - **Start Date:** 2023-06-27 - **Completion Date:** 2023-09-08 - **CT.gov Last Update:** 2026-02-06 ## Brief Summary First responders at the Federal, State and local level are those on the front lines of providing support to their communities during an emergency or a disaster. Their work domains are emergency public security, firefighting, law enforcement, emergency response, and emergency medical care. Due to the inherent characteristics of the jobs they perform, they are constantly exposed to very stressful, demanding and dangerous work environments. Such an exposure often leads to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). More than 80 percent of first responders experience traumatic events on their job duty. Various efforts to treat about trauma have been made to address the first responders' mental health. However, existing interventions are not directly targeted at the causes of mental health problems, which is the memory of the adverse events. The objective the proposed research is to investigate the effect of immersive virtual reality (VR) experience on the memory of an adverse event (e.g., fire). ## Detailed Description Background: First responders, such as firefighters, experience significant mental health issues due to the high-stress nature of their work. Existing mental health interventions, such as meditation and debriefing, despite their benefits, do not target cognitive processing of traumatic events such as memory and emotion. Objective: This work aims to examine effects of semantically irrelevant virtual reality (VR) content to intervene in the retrieval of an adverse event memory and its associated emotions. Cognitive models of posttraumatic stress disorder posit that exposure to stimuli that are similar to a previous trauma acts as a trigger for retrieval of the associated memory and bodily reaction (eg, elevated heart rate). This work uses semantically irrelevant VR as an intervention to interrupt the retrieval of the traumatic memory by placing a participant in a VR environment that has a distant semantic connection to the trauma. Methods: A total of 107 participants recruited from a large public university in Texas was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: control (n=33), comparison (n=37), and intervention (n=37). In stage 1, participants in all groups watched a short video of an actual severe house fire to create a traumatic event memory. In stage 2, the control group stayed seated without doing anything, the comparison group read a paragraph about the Egyptian Ocean as semantically irrelevant follow-up information, and the intervention group watched a 360° VR video of the Egyptian Ocean that features opposite attributes to the fire (eg, blue water vs red fire, cool water vs hot fire). The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, which has 10 items for positive emotions (eg, attentive and excited) and 10 items for negative emotions (eg, scared and distressed), was administered after each of the two stages. In stage 3, the memory accuracy of the house fire video was assessed using a forced recognition test of 15 pairs of a true image and a fake image generated by artificial intelligence software. ## Eligibility - **Minimum age:** 18 Years - **Sex:** ALL - **Healthy Volunteers:** Yes ``` Inclusion Criteria: * aged at least 18 years * currently enrolled at the university Exclusion Criteria: * under 18 years * not currently enrolled at the university ``` ## Arms - **Intervention Group** (ACTIVE_COMPARATOR) — Intervention Group participants watched semantically irrelevant VR video of the Red Sea underwater diving 5 minutes after participants watched the fire video. - **Control** (NO_INTERVENTION) — Control group participants did not receive any intervention. - **Comparison Group** (PLACEBO_COMPARATOR) — Comparison Group participants read text description of the Red Sea underwater diving 5 minutes after participants watched the fire video. ## Interventions - **Watching VR video** (OTHER) — Participants watch 360-degree VR video of underwater diving 5 minutes after they watched the fire video. - **Reading text** (OTHER) — Participants read text paragraphs regarding underwater diving 5 minutes after they watched the fire video. ## Primary Outcomes - **Memory accuracy** _(time frame: Immediately after participants received the intervention.)_ — The ratio of correct images participants chose from two images of the fire video they watched. ## Secondary Outcomes - **Positive And Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)** _(time frame: Immediately after participants watched the fire video and immediately after they watched the VR video (intervention) or read the text (comparison).)_ ## Locations (1) - Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering Department, Lubbock, Texas, United States ## Recent Field Changes (last 30 days) - `status.overallStatus` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `status.primaryCompletionDate` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `status.completionDate` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `status.lastUpdatePostDate` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `design.phases` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `design.enrollmentCount` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `eligibility.criteria` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `eligibility.minAge` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `eligibility.sex` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `outcomes.primary` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `outcomes.secondary` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `armsInterventions.arms` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `armsInterventions.interventions` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `sponsor.lead` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `results.hasResults` — added _(2026-05-12)_ - `locations.industrial, manufacturing, & systems engineering department|lubbock|texas|united states` — added _(2026-05-12)_ --- *Canonical: https://parkinsonspathways.com/agent/trials/NCT07393776.md* *Source data (authoritative): https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07393776* *This page is a raw mirror with no AI summary, no editorial enrichment, and no Parkinson's-specific filtering.*