Augmentative effects of sleep in mirror exposure

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Steffen Gais; Professorin Jennifer Svaldi, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Silja Vocks
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516472599

Body dissatisfaction is highly prevalent especially among the female population and is associated with a number of psychosocial sequelae. Mirror exposure (ME) has been shown to significantly improve body satisfaction. Despite these promising results, post-treatment body dissatisfaction is often still clinically significant after ME. From a theoretical perspective, ME can be considered a training situation in which participants learn to tolerate negative emotions when confronted with their body. ME enables within- and between-session habituation; in addition, ME is thought to challenge pre-existing body-related memories and experiences with the aim to re-shape the memory for body-related information by forming and consolidating new memory traces. From this perspective, an approach that facilitates the toleration of negative body-related emotions by habituation and the formation of new memory traces could be an effective way to augment the efficacy of mirror exposure. This is the aim of the present project proposal. In a pre-registered study, n = 262 women with high body dissatisfaction are randomly allocated to either a waitlist control group (WL), a group with repeated ME followed by a nap (ME+N) or to a group of repeated ME followed by a comparable wake period (ME+W). ME+N and ME+W will receive two exposure sessions each on three exposure days distributed over three weeks, whereby nap and wake period (90 minutes) will occur between ME session one and two (day one), three and four (day two) and five and six (day three). Primary outcome is change in measures of body dissatisfaction from baseline to end of intervention/waiting period and at three-months follow-up.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants