Gold Andrea L, Jarcho Johanna M, Rosen Dana K, Pine Daniel S, Ernst Monique
Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health , Bethesda, Maryland.
J Child Adolesc Psychopharmacol. 2015 Dec;25(10):754-63. doi: 10.1089/cap.2015.0066. Epub 2015 Nov 6.
Perturbations in emotional conflict adaptation, an implicit regulatory process, have been observed in adult anxiety disorders. However, findings remain inconsistent and restricted to adults. The current study compares conflict adaptation in youth and adults, with and without anxiety disorders. We predicted conflict adaptation would be present in the healthy but not the anxious groups.
In a clinic setting, 111 participants (27 healthy youth, 22 anxious youth, 41 healthy adults, and 21 anxious adults) completed emotional and nonemotional conflict tasks. Groups did not differ (all p's >0.1) on intelligence quotient (IQ), gender, and socioeconomic status; age did not differ between healthy and anxious subjects in either age cohort. Separate four way mixed-design analyses of variance were conducted to test hypotheses regarding the influence of diagnosis, age group, and task type on accuracy (percent correct) and reaction time (RT) for conflict adaptation (incongruent trials preceded by incongruent vs. congruent trials) and conflict detection (incongruent vs. congruent trials).
Measures of conflict adaptation did not interact with diagnosis or age. There was a significant main effect of conflict adaptation across the overall sample in the expected direction for accuracy, but not RT. The well-replicated conflict detection effect also did emerge across tasks, with slower RT and lower accuracy for incongruent than for congruent trials. These effects were greater for the emotional than for nonemotional tasks. Finally, there were age differences in accuracy-based conflict detection specific to the emotional task, for which the size of the effect was larger for youth than for adults.
The current study of youth and adults did not replicate prior behavioral findings of failure to engage conflict adaptation in anxiety disorders. Therefore, more work is needed before widely adopting conflict adaptation paradigms as a standard neurocognitive marker for anxiety disorders.
情绪冲突适应是一种内隐调节过程，在成人焦虑症中已观察到其受到干扰。然而，研究结果仍不一致且仅限于成人。本研究比较了有和没有焦虑症的青年和成人的冲突适应情况。我们预测健康组会出现冲突适应，而焦虑组则不会。
在临床环境中，111名参与者（27名健康青年、22名焦虑青年、41名健康成人和21名焦虑成人）完成了情绪和非情绪冲突任务。各组在智商、性别和社会经济地位方面无差异（所有p值>0.1）；在两个年龄组中，健康和焦虑受试者的年龄也无差异。进行了单独的四因素混合设计方差分析，以检验关于诊断、年龄组和任务类型对冲突适应（不一致试验 preceded by incongruent与一致试验）和冲突检测（不一致与一致试验）的准确性（正确百分比）和反应时间（RT）的影响的假设。
冲突适应指标与诊断或年龄没有交互作用。在整个样本中，冲突适应在准确性方面有显著的主效应，且方向符合预期，但在反应时间方面没有。在各项任务中也确实出现了得到充分验证的冲突检测效应，不一致试验的反应时间比一致试验慢，准确性也更低。这些效应在情绪任务中比在非情绪任务中更大。最后，在基于准确性的情绪任务冲突检测中存在年龄差异，青年的效应大小比成人更大。
目前对青年和成人的研究并未重复先前关于焦虑症患者无法进行冲突适应的行为学研究结果。因此，在将冲突适应范式广泛用作焦虑症的标准神经认知标志物之前，还需要更多的研究工作。
