School of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Bristol, Medical Sciences Building, Bristol, BS8 1TD, UK.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2012 Jun;12(2):373-81. doi: 10.3758/s13415-011-0076-4.
Changes in the processing of emotional information are key features of affective disorders. Neuropsychological tests based on emotional faces or words are used to detect emotional/affective biases in humans, but these tests are not applicable to animal species. In the present study, we investigated whether a novel affective tone discrimination task (ATDT), developed to study emotion-related behaviour in rats, could also be used to quantify changes in affective states in humans. To date, the methods used in human neuropsychology have not been applicable to animal experiments. Participants completed a training session in which they learnt to discriminate specific tone frequencies and to correctly respond in order to gain emotionally valenced outcomes, to obtain rewards (money), or to avoid punishment (an aversive sound clip). During a subsequent test session, additional ambiguous probe tones were presented at frequencies intermediate between the reward and avoidance paired tones. At the end of the task, participants completed self-report questionnaires. All participants made more avoidance responses to the most ambiguous tone cues, suggesting a bias towards avoidance of punishment. Individual differences in the degrees of bias observed were correlated with anxiety measures, suggesting the task's sensitivity to differences in state anxiety within a healthy population. Further studies in clinical populations will be necessary to assess the task's sensitivity to pathological anxiety states. These data suggest that this affective tone discrimination task provides a novel method to study cognitive affective biases in different species, including humans, and offers a novel assessment to study anxiety.
情绪信息处理的变化是情感障碍的主要特征。基于情绪面孔或词语的神经心理学测试用于检测人类的情绪/情感偏见，但这些测试不适用于动物物种。在本研究中，我们研究了一种新的情感音调辨别任务 (ATDT)，该任务旨在研究大鼠的情绪相关行为，是否也可用于量化人类情感状态的变化。迄今为止，人类神经心理学中使用的方法不适用于动物实验。参与者完成了一个训练阶段，在该阶段中，他们学习辨别特定的音调频率，并正确做出反应以获得情感价值的结果，以获得奖励（钱），或避免惩罚（厌恶的声音片段）。在随后的测试阶段，在奖励和回避配对的音调之间呈现了额外的中间频率的不确定探针音调。在任务结束时，参与者完成了自我报告问卷。所有参与者对最不确定的音调提示做出更多的回避反应，这表明他们对回避惩罚有偏见。观察到的偏见程度的个体差异与焦虑测量相关，表明该任务对健康人群中状态焦虑的差异具有敏感性。还需要在临床人群中进一步研究，以评估该任务对病理性焦虑状态的敏感性。这些数据表明，这种情感音调辨别任务为研究不同物种（包括人类）的认知情感偏见提供了一种新方法，并提供了一种新的评估方法来研究焦虑。
