Neural and Cognitive Mechanisms for Removing Emotional Information from Working Memory

项目总结 当前项目的总体目标是了解如何将情感思想从一个人的 思想。大多数精神障碍的特点是无法消除消极的、侵入性的和适应不良的 发自内心的想法。以前研究一个人是否已经从头脑中清除了一个想法，依赖于 主要是自我报告措施(例如，“是的，我不再想车祸了”)。在这项拟议的研究中， 研究小组将使用大脑成像方法和机器学习技术相结合的方法 从计算机科学提供一个客观的神经标记，以确定一个想法是否真的被移除了 发自内心。这一方法建立在研究团队首创的这项技术已被证明成功的基础上。这 先前的工作侧重于从头脑中移除(情感中立的)信息，并证明了 抑制特定的思想和清除头脑中的所有思想依赖于不同的神经机制。 此外，先前的研究结果表明，这些心理操作对一个人的吸收能力有不同的影响 删除旧信息后的新信息。拟议项目的重点将是 检查情绪信息是如何从当前的思想中移除的。该项目将提出三个主要问题。 首先，它将考察信息的情感价位是否会影响信息的参与度和有效性 神经系统参与从大脑中移除信息。一系列平行研究，其中一项涉及 神经成像和另一种检查人的行为的方法旨在检查这些移除 操作受a)要删除的信息的情感价值(积极、消极)的影响，b) 现在应该记住的信息的情感价值以及c)匹配(例如，肯定的， 正)或不匹配(正、负)在被删除的信息的价位和 取而代之。人们的预期是，负面信息将更难删除，更容易被带入 当前的想法比积极的信息更重要。其次，该项目将检查这些措施的有效性 移走操作因个人而异。它将评估个人报告的程度，他们有 难以控制他们的思想，他们有与抑郁和焦虑有关的症状的程度， 以及他们在工作记忆中保存和处理信息的能力。期望值是那些 报告说，他们在控制自己的思想方面有困难，也很难从头脑中删除信息，而且 抑郁程度较高的人在消除负面想法方面会有特别的困难。第三， 该项目将检查个人是否可以接受培训，使用关于大脑功能的实时反馈 神经成像，通过向他们提供一种感觉是什么，有效地从大脑中移除想法 成功地删除了一个想法。拟议项目的结果将对以下两个方面产生重要影响 理解以精神病理学为特征的反复出现的侵入性思维，并为 对如何减少他们的洞察力。

PROJECT SUMMARY The overall objective of the current project is to understand how emotional thoughts can be removed from one's mind. Most psychiatric disorders are characterized by an inability to remove negative, intrusive, and maladaptive thoughts from mind. Previously examining whether an individual has purged a thought from mind has relied mainly on self-report measures (e.g., “Yes, I stopped thinking about the car crash”). In the proposed research, the research team will use a combination of brain imaging approaches with machine learning techniques drawn from computer science to provide an objective neural marker of whether indeed a thought has been removed from mind. This approach builds on proven success with this technique pioneered by the research team. This prior work focused on the removal of (emotionally neutral) information from mind and demonstrated that suppressing a specific thought and clearing one's mind of all thought rely on different neural mechanisms. Moreover, the prior findings indicated that these mental operations differentially affect one's ability to take in new information after the old information has been removed. The focus of the proposed project will be to examine how emotional information is removed from current thought. The project will ask three main questions. First, it will examine whether the emotional valence of information affects the engagement and effectiveness of neural systems involved in removing information from mind. A series of parallel studies, one involving neuroimaging and the other examining people's behavior, are designed to examine whether these removal operations are affected by a) the emotional valence (positive, negative) of the information to be removed, b) the emotional valence of the information that should now be brought to mind and c) the match (e.g., positive, positive) or mismatch (positive, negative) between the valence of the information being removed and that which replaces it. Expectations are that negative information will be harder to remove and easier to be brought into current thought than positive information. Second, the project will examine whether the effectiveness of these removal operations varies across individuals. It will assess the degree to which individuals report that they have difficulty controlling their thoughts, the degree to which they have symptoms related to depression and anxiety, and their ability to hold and manipulate information in working memory. Expectations are that individuals who report difficulty in controlling their thoughts will have difficulty in removing information from mind, and that people with higher levels of depression will have specific difficulties in removing negative thoughts. Third, the project will examine whether individuals can be trained, using real-time feedback about brain function during neuroimaging, to effectively remove thoughts from mind by providing them with a sense of what it feels like to successfully remove a thought. The results of the proposed project will have important implications both for understanding the recurrent and intrusive thoughts that characterize psychopathology and for providing insights on how they might be reduced.