University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Martinistr. 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany.
Psychiatry Res. 2013 May 15;207(1-2):73-9. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2012.11.024. Epub 2013 Jan 18.
An attentional bias for trauma-related verbal cues was frequently demonstrated in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using variants of the emotional Stroop task (EST). However, the mechanisms underlying the Stroop-effect are ill-defined and it is yet unclear how the findings apply to different paradigms and stimulus modalities. To address these open questions, for the first time a spatial-cuing task with pictorial cues of different emotional valence was administered to trauma-exposed individuals with and without PTSD, and non-trauma-exposed controls. Groups did not show different response profiles across affective conditions. However, a group effect was evident when comparing depressed with non-depressed individuals: Those with depression showed delayed attending towards trauma-related cues and faster attending away from negative cues. In correlational analyses, attentional avoidance was associated with both depression and PTSD symptom severity. These findings highlight the need for research on trauma populations and anxiety in general to pay closer attention to depression as an important confound in the study of emotional information processing.
创伤相关的语言线索注意力偏向在创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）中经常通过情绪斯特鲁普任务（EST）的变体来证明。然而，斯特鲁普效应的机制尚不清楚，目前尚不清楚这些发现如何适用于不同的范式和刺激模式。为了解决这些悬而未决的问题，首次向有创伤和无创伤后应激障碍的创伤暴露个体以及无创伤暴露对照者施行了带有不同情绪效价的图片线索的空间提示任务。各组在不同的情感条件下没有表现出不同的反应模式。然而，当比较抑郁和非抑郁个体时，出现了组间效应：抑郁者对创伤相关线索的注意力延迟，对负性线索的注意力更快。在相关分析中，注意力回避与抑郁和 PTSD 症状严重程度均相关。这些发现强调了对创伤人群和一般焦虑进行研究的必要性，需要更加关注抑郁作为情绪信息处理研究中的一个重要混杂因素。
