MECHANISMS OF ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

本项目将研究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中注意加工的影响。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都有缺陷。注意、记忆和判断方面的偏见也有记录。尽管情感障碍对认知的影响有充分的记录，但对情感对涉及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感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具有推测性。该计划将科学家们聚集在一起，利用不同的方法（行为表现、脑电图/ erp、功能磁共振成像）研究大脑功能，努力同时研究与注意力和情绪有关的大脑结构。该项目由两个完善的互补模型指导：一个是基于临床的精神病理学情感神经心理学模型，由Heller、Miller及其同事广泛研究；另一个是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具体假设。我们将比较经典色词Stroop任务的表现和区域大脑活动测量值与情感Stroop任务的相同变量，情感Stroop任务在最近的焦虑研究中受到了很多关注。在情感Stroop中，个体忽略了威胁性词语的内容，而注意并识别了词语出现的墨水颜色。焦虑的个体在威胁性词语上表现出比中性词语更大的干扰效应，这一效应在对照组中没有表现出来。抑郁症患者对引起损失或负面影响的词语也表现出类似的效果。我们最近的功能磁共振成像研究表明，一个类似的神经网络参与了情感Stroop和颜色词Stroop。在这两个版本的Stroop中提出的血液动力学和电生理学方法的融合将使我们能够在一系列情绪和精神病理学中测试涉及情感和注意力的神经网络相互作用的假设。

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.