Anxiety and Attention: Electrophysiological Measurement of Enhancement and Suppr

描述（由申请人提供）：注意力和情绪具有双向关系，在驱动人类行为方面起着重要作用。本研究的目的是促进我们对焦虑中注意-情绪相互作用和个体差异的认知和神经机制的理解。具体而言，该项目将结合行为和新事件相关电位（ERP）测量来表征情绪刺激的注意分配的精确机制和时间过程。在本质上具有威胁性的情绪刺激已被证明是特别有效的注意力调节器。事实上，对威胁刺激的异常注意力分配已被认为是焦虑症的潜在病因。本研究将研究威胁情境下注意力的神经和行为指标，以确定驱动注意力-情绪相互作用和焦虑个体差异的基本机制。我们将使用一个经过验证的注意力分配的ERP测量（N2pc组件）来评估对威胁刺激的注意力分配的大小和时间过程。我们还将使用新发现的ERP注意抑制测量（Pd成分）来评估自上而下对威胁刺激的抑制。总之，这两种ERP措施将有可能隔离通常混杂在一起的威胁处理的各个方面

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Attention and emotion have a bidirectional relationship, which serves a strong role in driving human behavior. The purpose of the present proposal is to advance our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie attention-emotion interactions and individual differences in anxiety. Specifically, the proposed project will use a combination of behavioral and novel event-related potential (ERP) measures to characterize the precise mechanisms and time course of attentional allocation to emotional stimuli. Emotional stimuli that are threatening in nature have been shown to be especially potent modulators of attention. Indeed, abnormal allocation of attention to threatening stimuli has been implicated as a potential etiological factor in anxiety disorders. The proposed research will examine neural and behavioral indices of attention in the context of threat to pinpoint the basic mechanisms that drive attention-emotion interactions and individual differences in anxiety. We will use a well-validated ERP measure of the allocation of attention (the N2pc component) to assess the magnitude and time course of attentional allocation to threatening stimuli. We will also use a newly discovered ERP measure of attentional suppression (the Pd component) to assess the top-down suppression of threatening stimuli. Together, these two ERP measures will make it possible to isolate separate aspects of threat processing that are ordinarily intermixed in behavioral measures. Moreover, the proposed project will examine how these processes vary as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety to characterize the role of atypical attentional processes in characterizing anxiety. This follows from pilot data in which we observed substantial individual differences in ERP indices of suppression of threat, which in turn made it possible to identify individual differences in behavioral measures of threat processing. We will also examine the effects of direct manipulations of state anxiety on these measures. Moreover, because anxiety disorders often involve the acquisition of conditioned emotional responses, we will also examine attention and suppression in the context of conditioned threat. This research will serve an important role in furthering our basic science understanding of the relationships among attention, emotion, and anxiety, and it will also inform future clinical work on anxiety.