Department of Psychiatry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
PLoS One. 2010 Nov 30;5(11):e14150. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014150.
Previous investigations revealed that the impact of task-irrelevant emotional distraction on ongoing goal-oriented cognitive processing is linked to opposite patterns of activation in emotional and perceptual vs. cognitive control/executive brain regions. However, little is known about the role of individual variations in these responses. The present study investigated the effect of trait anxiety on the neural responses mediating the impact of transient anxiety-inducing task-irrelevant distraction on cognitive performance, and on the neural correlates of coping with such distraction. We investigated whether activity in the brain regions sensitive to emotional distraction would show dissociable patterns of co-variation with measures indexing individual variations in trait anxiety and cognitive performance.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Event-related fMRI data, recorded while healthy female participants performed a delayed-response working memory (WM) task with distraction, were investigated in conjunction with behavioural measures that assessed individual variations in both trait anxiety and WM performance. Consistent with increased sensitivity to emotional cues in high anxiety, specific perceptual areas (fusiform gyrus--FG) exhibited increased activity that was positively correlated with trait anxiety and negatively correlated with WM performance, whereas specific executive regions (right lateral prefrontal cortex--PFC) exhibited decreased activity that was negatively correlated with trait anxiety. The study also identified a role of the medial and left lateral PFC in coping with distraction, as opposed to reflecting a detrimental impact of emotional distraction.
These findings provide initial evidence concerning the neural mechanisms sensitive to individual variations in trait anxiety and WM performance, which dissociate the detrimental impact of emotion distraction and the engagement of mechanisms to cope with distracting emotions. Our study sheds light on the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions in normal behaviour, which has implications for understanding factors that may influence susceptibility to affective disorders, in general, and to anxiety disorders, in particular.
先前的研究表明，与无关情绪分心对持续目标导向认知加工的影响与情绪和知觉与认知控制/执行脑区的激活模式相反。然而，对于这些反应个体差异的作用知之甚少。本研究调查了特质焦虑对介导短暂引起无关情绪分心对认知表现的影响的神经反应的影响，以及对应对这种分心的神经相关性的影响。我们研究了在情绪分心敏感的脑区的活动是否会与个体特质焦虑和认知表现的变化指标表现出可分离的协变模式。
方法/主要发现：在健康女性参与者进行分心的延迟反应工作记忆（WM）任务时记录的事件相关 fMRI 数据，与评估个体特质焦虑和 WM 表现变化的行为测量相结合进行了研究。与高焦虑症患者对情绪线索的敏感性增加一致，特定的感知区域（梭状回——FG）表现出与特质焦虑呈正相关、与 WM 表现呈负相关的活动增加，而特定的执行区域（右侧外侧前额叶皮层——PFC）表现出与特质焦虑呈负相关的活动减少。该研究还确定了内侧和左侧前额叶皮层在应对分心方面的作用，而不是反映情绪分心的不利影响。
这些发现为个体特质焦虑和 WM 表现的神经机制提供了初步证据，这些机制分离了情绪分心的不利影响和应对分心情绪的机制的参与。我们的研究揭示了正常行为中情绪-认知相互作用的神经相关性，这对理解可能影响一般情感障碍、特别是焦虑障碍易感性的因素具有重要意义。
