MECHANISMS OF ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

本研究将探讨精神病理学中认知功能障碍的心理和神经机制的相互作用，强调情绪对焦虑和抑郁症注意力处理的影响。 最近的研究表明，焦虑和抑郁的特点是认知障碍和偏见。 焦虑与对威胁性刺激的注意偏向密切相关。 在抑郁症中，已经描述了外显记忆、执行功能和视觉空间技能的缺陷。 注意力、记忆力和判断力的偏差也被记录在案。尽管这些情感障碍对认知的影响得到了很好的证明，但人们对情感对参与认知的特定大脑区域的影响知之甚少。 虽然我们和其他人已经描述了一些关于大脑中情绪和认知相互作用的理论可能性，但目前缺乏经验数据使这些假设成为投机性的。 该项目汇集了使用不同方法（行为表现，EEG/ERPs，fMRI）研究大脑功能的科学家，以同时研究涉及注意力和情绪的大脑结构。 该项目由两个发展良好的互补模型指导：一个是由Heller、米勒及其同事广泛研究的精神病理学中情绪的临床神经心理学模型，另一个是由Banich及其同事开发的注意力规范模型。 这些模型的整合使我们能够产生关于焦虑和抑郁的区域大脑活动模式及其在注意力处理中的作用的特定假设。 我们将比较经典的颜色词Stroop任务的性能和区域大脑活动措施的情绪Stroop任务，一个范式，在最近的焦虑研究中受到了很大的关注。 在情绪Stroop中，个体忽略威胁性词语的内容，而注意并识别词语出现的墨水颜色。 焦虑的人表现出更大的干扰效果的威胁比中性的话，效果是不显示的控制。 抑郁的个体对引起损失或负面影响的词语表现出类似的效果。我们最近的功能磁共振成像研究表明，情绪Stroop和颜色词Stroop都涉及类似的神经网络。在这两个版本的Stroop中，血液动力学和电生理学方法的融合将使我们能够测试有关情绪和注意力神经网络在一系列情绪和精神病理学中相互作用的假设。

This project will examine the interaction of psychological and neural mechanisms involved in cognitive dysfunction in psychopathology, emphasizing the impact of emotion on attentional processing in anxiety and depression. Recent research has demonstrated that anxiety and depression are characterized by cognitive impairments and biases. Anxiety has been strongly associated with an attentional bias to threatening stimuli. In depression, deficits have been described for explicit memory, executive functions, and visuospatial skills. Biases in attention, memory, and judgement have also been documented. Despite these well documented effects of affective disorder on cognition, much less is known about the effects of emotion on the specific brain regions involved in cognition. Although we and others have described a number of theoretical possibilities regarding the interaction of emotion and cognition in the brain, at present a lack of empirical data renders these hypotheses speculative. The proposed project brings together scientists investigating brain function using different methods (behavioral performance, EEG/ERPs, fMRI) in an effort to examine concurrently the brain structures involved in attention and emotion. The project is guided by two well developed and complementary models: a clinically based neuropsychological model of emotion in psychopathology extensively investigated by Heller, Miller, and colleagues, and a normative model of attention developed by Banich and colleagues. The integration of these models allows us to generate specific hypotheses about patterns of regional brain activity in anxiety and depression and their role in attentional processing. We will compare performance and regional brain activity measures on the classic color-word Stroop task to the same variables on an emotional Stroop task, a paradigm that has received much attention in recent anxiety research. In the emotional Stroop, individuals ignore the content of threatening words while attending to and identifying the ink color in which the words appear. Anxious individuals demonstrate a larger interference effect for threatening than for neutral words, an effect that is not shown by controls. Depressed individuals show a similar effect for words that evoke loss or negative affect. Our recent fMRI studies suggest that a similar neural network is involved in both the emotional Stroop and the color-word Stroop. The proposed convergence of hemodynamic and electrophysiological methods across these two versions of the Stroop will enable us to test hypotheses about the interaction of neural networks involved in emotion and attention across a range of mood and psychopathology.