Psychopathology and emotional response

精神病理学和情绪反应

• 批准号: 6347653
• 负责人: CHRISTOPHER JOHN PATRICK
• 金额: $ 10.99万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-09-01 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6347653
• 关键词: antisocial personality; attention; behavioral /social science research tag; cognition; emotions; evoked potentials; human subject; neural information processing; personality; psychophysiology; stimulus /response

The clinical syndrome of psychopathic personality offers an important model for studying the interplay between emotion and attention. Psychopathy is theorized to involve a disconnection between cognitive representations and affective response, and empirical studies have revealed abnormalities in fear reactivity and in attentional processing in psychopathic individuals. Recent research with male prisoners using a picture-viewing paradigm suggests that: (a) psychopaths have a higher than normal threshold for the transition from stimulus orienting to defense, such that (in relation to nonpsychopaths) an aversive foreground must be more intense to produce defensive activation and startle reflex potentiation, and (b) psychopaths show an absence of startle response differentiation between affective and neutral foregrounds early (i.e., 300 ms) after picture onset, suggesting a deficiency in motivated attention (Lang, Bradley, and Cuthbert, 1997). Drawing on recent developments in the use of startle and brain-ERP measures to index affect and attention during picture processing, a series of three experiments is proposed to directly test the hypothesis that psychopathy involves a heightened aversion threshold, and to examine the mediating role of attention in this affective deviation. To examine the generality of the phenomena under study participants will include female as well as male prisoners, and also nonprisoner men with personality traits of psychopathy. Study I compares the startle-probe reactions during aversive pictures of varying intensity in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic women offenders. Study II compares emotional activation and attention- allocation to pleasant and unpleasant pictures of varying intensity in college men either high or low in features of psychopathy, using startle and ERP measures. Study III examines brain and blink indices of early attentional processing of affective and neutral pictures in psychopathic, nonpsychopathic, and antisocial prisoner men. This research should contribute to our understanding of pathological processes underlying psychopathy, and also to a basic understanding of emotion- attention interactions and normal variations in personality and behavior.

精神病态人格的临床症状为研究情绪与注意之间的相互作用提供了一个重要的模型。精神变态的理论涉及认知表征和情感反应之间的脱节，经验研究已经揭示了精神变态个体在恐惧反应和注意力处理方面的异常。最近对使用图片观看范式的男性囚犯的研究表明：(A)精神病患者从刺激定向到防御的转换阈值高于正常阈值，因此(相对于非精神病患者)厌恶前景必须更强烈才能产生防御激活和惊恐反射增强，以及(B)精神病患者在图片开始后早期(即300ms)表现出情感和中性前景之间的惊吓反应差异，这表明动机注意不足(Lang，Bradley和Cuthbert，1997)。根据最近在使用惊吓和脑事件相关电位测量来指示图片加工过程中的情绪和注意力的发展，我们提出了一系列三个实验，以直接检验精神病与高厌恶阈值有关的假设，并检验注意在这种情感偏差中的中介作用。为了研究这些现象的普遍性，研究参与者将包括男性囚犯和女性囚犯，以及具有精神变态人格特征的非囚犯男性。研究一比较了精神病女性罪犯和非精神病女性罪犯在不同强度的厌恶图片中的惊吓探测反应。研究二使用惊吓和事件相关电位测量，比较了大学男生的情绪激活和注意力分配与不同强度的愉快和不愉快的画面，无论是高强度还是低强度的精神变态特征。研究三考察了精神变态、非精神变态和反社会囚犯对情感图片和中性图片的早期注意加工的大脑和眨眼指数。这项研究应该有助于我们理解精神变态的病理过程，也有助于我们对情绪-注意相互作用以及人格和行为的正常变化的基本理解。