Anxiety and Attention: Electrophysiological Measurement of Enhancement and Suppr

描述(由申请者提供)：注意力和情绪具有双向关系，这对推动人类行为具有很强的作用。这项建议的目的是促进我们对认知和神经机制的理解，这些机制是焦虑中注意力-情绪相互作用和个体差异的基础。具体地说，拟议的项目将使用行为和新颖的事件相关电位(ERP)测量相结合的方法来表征对情绪刺激的注意力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注意力的特别有效的调节器。事实上，对威胁性刺激的异常注意力分配已被认为是焦虑症的一个潜在病因。这项拟议的研究将在威胁的背景下检查注意力的神经和行为指标，以确定驱动注意力-情绪交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成分)来评估对威胁刺激的注意分配的大小和时间进程。我们还将使用一种新发现的注意力抑制事件相关电位测量(PD成分)来评估对威胁刺激的自上而下的抑制。这两个ERP措施结合在一起，将使隔离通常混合在一起的威胁处理的不同方面成为可能 行为测量。此外，这项拟议的项目将研究这些过程如何随着特质焦虑的个体差异而变化，以表征非典型注意过程在表征焦虑中的作用。这是从试点数据中得出的，在这些数据中，我们观察到了抑制威胁的ERP指数的显著个体差异，这反过来又使得识别威胁处理的行为测量的个体差异成为可能。我们还将研究对状态焦虑的直接操纵对这些测量的影响。此外，由于焦虑症通常涉及到条件性情绪反应的获得，我们还将在条件性威胁的背景下考察注意力和压抑。这项研究将对我们深入理解注意、情绪和焦虑之间的关系起到重要的基础科学作用，也将为未来的焦虑症临床工作提供参考。

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.