Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 Feb 28;185(3):387-93. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2010.07.020. Epub 2010 Aug 15.
The role of attentional biases in panic disorder has been well characterised. However, recent studies suggest an important effect of antidepressant and anxiolytic drugs on cognitive bias and most studies have included medicated patients in their sample. This study therefore examined cognitive bias in an untreated sample of participants with panic disorder (PD). A sample of 23 untreated participants with panic disorder with or without agoraphobia (PPD) and 22 healthy controls (HC) were tested with a Facial Expression Recognition task featuring different emotional intensities, a Faces Dot Probe task, a Self Beliefs task and an Emotional Stroop task. PPD showed exaggerated attentional biases to negative face and word stimuli in two different paradigms and endorsed more panic-related and negative self-attributions. They also showed enhanced perception of facial expressions of sadness. These tasks are sensitive to cognitive bias in a community-based sample of untreated PD participants. Attentional biases in panic disorder cannot be explained by the use of medication in this group and may therefore play a critical role in the underlying pathogenesis of the disorder.
注意偏向在惊恐障碍中的作用已经得到了很好的描述。然而，最近的研究表明抗抑郁药和抗焦虑药对认知偏差有重要影响，而且大多数研究都将用药患者纳入了样本。因此，本研究在未接受治疗的惊恐障碍患者样本中检查了认知偏差。研究纳入了 23 名未接受治疗的伴有或不伴有广场恐惧症的惊恐障碍患者（PPD）和 22 名健康对照组（HC），并使用具有不同情绪强度的面部表情识别任务、面孔点探测任务、自我信念任务和情绪斯特鲁普任务对他们进行了测试。结果显示，PPD 在两种不同的范式中对负性面孔和词语刺激表现出过度的注意偏向，且更多地认同与惊恐相关的和消极的自我归因。他们还表现出对悲伤面部表情的感知增强。这些任务对未接受治疗的 PD 患者的认知偏差具有敏感性。在该组中，惊恐障碍中的注意力偏差不能用药物使用来解释，因此可能在疾病的潜在发病机制中起着关键作用。
