Clinical Research Directory

The two paired tasks Free Association Task (FAT) and Sentence Completion Task (SCT) form the core of the AI-integrated Proactive Thought Control (PTC) program. FAT shows a social-threat word and the participant types the first associated word, training proactive control at the lexical level; SCT then gives unfinished social-evaluative stems to complete with a benign word, extending the override to the propositional level. Both run three blocks of thirty self-paced trials per session (720 over two weeks), so every threat trial forces a positive, cue-relevant representation that overrides a primed negative associate before advancing. AI integration relies on real-time validation: SiEBERT scores sentiment and MiniLM embedding confirm semantic relevance, enforcing a positive, cue-relevant construal each trial. Feedback reinforces this accepted responses earn points, rejected one prompt revision, and the threshold relaxes after four failures and pass after eight.

8-session CBT protocol ( Hope, Heimberg \& Turk, 2019 manual) The CBT arm received an eight-session protocol moving from psychoeducation and the three-component model of social anxiety with an individualized Fear and Avoidance Hierarchy (Sessions 1-2), through cognitive restructuring using disputing questions from automatic thought to rational response (Sessions 3-4), to repeated graded exposure using role-plays, distress ratings, and added cognitive tools, with the final session offering core-belief work and setting post-treatment maintenance goals (Sessions 5-8)

Participants did the same two tasks as the experimental group. The Free Association Task and the Sentence Completion Task , matched on stimuli, format, and time. The key difference was that the control removed the core training element: responses were not checked for meaning against the cue, and about half of the negative answers were accepted without correction, so the link between a threat cue and forcing a positive response was broken. In short, the control group did the same tasks and got the same exposure, but without the active thinking-training component.