MECHANISMS OF ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign IL

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Abstract

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.