Buodo Giulia, Mento Giovanni, Sarlo Michela, Palomba Daniela
a Department of General Psychology , University of Padova , Padova , Italy.
Cogn Emot. 2015;29(4):604-20. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2014.926862. Epub 2014 Jun 12.
The present study investigated whether dysphoric individuals have a difficulty in disengaging attention from negative stimuli and/or reduced attention to positive information. Sad, neutral and happy facial stimuli were presented in an attention-shifting task to 18 dysphoric and 18 control participants. Reaction times to neutral shapes (squares and diamonds) and the event-related potentials to emotional faces were recorded. Dysphoric individuals did not show impaired attentional disengagement from sad faces or facilitated disengagement from happy faces. Right occipital lateralisation of P100 was absent in dysphoric individuals, possibly indicating reduced attention-related sensory facilitation for faces. Frontal P200 was largest for sad faces among dysphoric individuals, whereas controls showed larger amplitude to both sad and happy as compared with neutral expressions, suggesting that dysphoric individuals deployed early attention to sad, but not happy, expressions. Importantly, the results were obtained controlling for the participants' trait anxiety. We conclude that at least under some circumstances the presence of depressive symptoms can modulate early, automatic stages of emotional processing.
本研究调查了烦躁不安的个体是否难以将注意力从负面刺激中脱离出来，以及/或者对正面信息的关注度是否降低。在一项注意力转移任务中，向18名烦躁不安的参与者和18名对照参与者呈现悲伤、中性和快乐的面部刺激。记录对中性形状（正方形和菱形）的反应时间以及对情绪化面孔的事件相关电位。烦躁不安的个体在从悲伤面孔上脱离注意力方面没有表现出受损，也没有在从快乐面孔上更容易脱离注意力。烦躁不安的个体中P100没有右枕叶侧化，这可能表明对面孔的注意力相关感觉促进作用降低。在烦躁不安的个体中，悲伤面孔的额叶P200最大，而与中性表情相比，对照者对悲伤和快乐面孔的波幅都更大，这表明烦躁不安的个体早期将注意力集中在悲伤而非快乐表情上。重要的是，这些结果是在控制了参与者的特质焦虑后获得的。我们得出结论，至少在某些情况下，抑郁症状的存在可以调节情绪加工的早期自动阶段。
