MECHANISMS OF ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

本项目将在精神病理学中研究认知功能障碍所涉及的心理和神经机制之间的相互作用，强调情绪对焦虑和抑郁患者注意过程的影响。最近的研究表明，焦虑和抑郁的特征是认知障碍和偏见。焦虑与对威胁性刺激的注意偏向密切相关。在抑郁症中，外显记忆、执行功能和视觉空间技能方面的缺陷已被描述。注意力、记忆力和判断力方面的偏差也被记录在案。尽管情感障碍对认知的影响得到了很好的证明，但关于情绪对涉及认知的特定大脑区域的影响却知之甚少。虽然我们和其他人已经描述了许多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推测。这个拟议的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，试图同时检查涉及注意力和情绪的大脑结构。该项目由两个发展良好且互补的模型指导：一个是Heller、Miller及同事广泛研究的精神病理学中基于临床的神经心理学情绪模型，另一个是Banich及其同事开发的标准注意力模型。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具体假设。我们将比较经典颜色词Stroop任务和情绪Stroop任务的表现和区域大脑活动指标，情绪Stroop任务是一种在最近的焦虑研究中受到极大关注的范式。在情绪Stroop中，个体忽略威胁词的内容，而注意并识别出现这些词的墨水颜色。焦虑个体对威胁性词语的干扰效应大于对中性词语的干扰效应，而控制组没有表现出这种效应。抑郁的人对引起失落或负面情绪的词语表现出类似的影响。我们最近的功能磁共振研究表明，一个类似的神经网络参与了情绪Stroop和颜色词Stroop。在Stroop的这两个版本中，血流动力学和电生理方法的拟议融合将使我们能够测试关于涉及情绪和注意力的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.