An Exploratory Randomized Controlled Trial of Personalized Lifestyle Advice and Tandem Skydives as a Means to Reduce Anhedonia☆
Section snippets
the present study
The first aim of this exploratory study was to examine whether personalized lifestyle advice, based on observed patterns of pleasure and lifestyle factors, can increase pleasure and PA and decrease depressive symptoms and negative affect (NA) in anhedonic young adults. Secondly, we explored the provoking idea that a free fall may foster the implementation of the lifestyle advice, by testing whether lifestyle advice combined with a tandem skydive had a more positive effect than lifestyle advice
participants
Participants were selected through an online screening survey among 2,937 young adults (M age = 21.4 years, SD = 1.9, 78% female) from the northern part of the Netherlands. Inclusion criteria were persistent anhedonia and willingness to perform a skydive. Persistent anhedonia was defined as a pleasure level below the 25th percentile, which was experienced as lower than normal, and lasted for at least 2 months. Hence, the criteria involved not only a low level of pleasure, but also that this low
participant flow
In total, 71 participants started with the momentary assessments (see Figure 2 for a flowchart). Two participants dropped out from the study: one due to problems with mobile data subscription and another because she stopped filling out the momentary assessments. One participant did not partake in the skydive due to the possibility of panic attacks related to skydiving. She only received the lifestyle advice but was maintained in the tandem skydive group in the analyses, in line with the
Discussion
The main aim of this exploratory study was to examine whether personalized lifestyle advice and tandem skydiving could reduce anhedonia in young adults. Although the small sample size warrants prudence, we showed that the lifestyle advice can increase pleasure and PA in young adults with persistent anhedonia. Despite previous literature suggesting that a free-fall may reboot the reward system and could therewith provide additional benefits, we found no evidence of such an additional effect of
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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Research reported in this publication was supported by a Vici grant (016.001/002) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to Albertine J. Oldehinkel. We would like to specifically thank Ando Emerencia and Rob Wanders for their help with the analyses and graphical representations, Tom Bak for coordinating all data collection activities, and Sanne van der Ploeg, Grejanne Dijkstra, and Nicole Snippen for their assistance in data collection.