Lanteaume Laura, Bartolomei Fabrice, Bastien-Toniazzo Mireille
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Epilepsy Behav. 2009 Jun;15(2):218-24. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2009.03.034. Epub 2009 Apr 26.
Emotional distress is one of the most frequently reported seizure precipitants in epilepsy, but little is known about its causes and processes. Interestingly, it is now accepted that emotional distress, such as anxiety, may be accompanied by evolutionary adaptation, or abnormal attentional vigilance toward threatening stimuli. The goal of this research was to study the link between emotional seizure precipitants and pathological attention-related biases toward threat in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). To this aim, patients were asked to report the extent to which seizures were elicited or not by emotional precipitants, allowing distinction of two groups: "Emo-TLE" group and "Other-TLE" group. Attentional biases were investigated by comparing patients' emotional Stroop and dot detection paradigms with those of healthy individuals (control group). We found that the Emo-TLE group was characterized by attentional bias toward threatening stimuli compared with neutral stimuli and compared with the other two groups. We thus hypothesize that attentional biases related to threat in patients with TLE may sustain emotional vulnerability and seizure occurrence.
情绪困扰是癫痫中最常被报告的发作诱因之一，但对其原因和过程却知之甚少。有趣的是，现在人们普遍认为，情绪困扰，如焦虑，可能伴随着进化适应，或对威胁性刺激的异常注意力警惕。本研究的目的是探讨颞叶癫痫（TLE）中情绪性发作诱因与对威胁的病理性注意力相关偏差之间的联系。为此，要求患者报告情绪诱因引发癫痫的程度，从而区分出两组：“情绪性颞叶癫痫”组和“其他颞叶癫痫”组。通过将患者的情绪Stroop和点探测范式与健康个体（对照组）的范式进行比较，研究注意力偏差。我们发现，与中性刺激相比，与其他两组相比，情绪性颞叶癫痫组的特征是对威胁性刺激存在注意力偏差。因此，我们假设，颞叶癫痫患者中与威胁相关的注意力偏差可能会维持情绪易感性和癫痫发作。
