Xue Song, Wang Shanshan, Kong Xia, Qiu Jiang
1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.
2 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Clin EEG Neurosci. 2017 Mar;48(2):103-110. doi: 10.1177/1550059416631658. Epub 2016 Jul 10.
Emotional conflict has received increased attention as a research topic. The objective of this study is to confirm that the processing of emotional conflict is impaired in treatment-resistant depression (TRD). We compared the event-related potentials of 17 patients with TRD and 17 healthy controls during the face-word Stroop task, which is an effective way of assessing the effects of emotional conflict directly. Compared with healthy controls, the accuracy scores of the TRD patients were lower in both "congruent stimuli" and "incongruent stimuli" conditions, and their response times were longer. The TRD patients also had larger N2 amplitudes over the frontal region, regardless of stimulus condition, which might reflect that TRD patients pay more attention to emotional information. A larger P3 amplitude over the frontal region for "incongruent stimuli minus congruent stimuli" was also found among patients with TRD, which indicates interference effects in the Stroop task. The results of this study provide novel behavioral and neurophysiological evidence of anomalies in cognitive inhibition among patients with TRD using the word-face task. These findings not only improve our understanding of deficient inhibition in TRD, but also pave the way for a cognitive neuropsychiatric model of depression.
作为一个研究主题，情绪冲突已受到越来越多的关注。本研究的目的是证实难治性抑郁症（TRD）患者存在情绪冲突处理障碍。我们比较了17例TRD患者和17名健康对照者在面孔-单词Stroop任务中的事件相关电位，这是一种直接评估情绪冲突影响的有效方法。与健康对照者相比，TRD患者在“一致刺激”和“不一致刺激”条件下的准确率得分均较低，反应时间更长。无论刺激条件如何，TRD患者额叶区域的N2波幅也更大，这可能反映出TRD患者更关注情绪信息。在TRD患者中还发现，“不一致刺激减去一致刺激”时额叶区域的P3波幅更大，这表明在Stroop任务中存在干扰效应。本研究结果提供了新的行为和神经生理学证据，证明TRD患者在使用面孔-单词任务时认知抑制存在异常。这些发现不仅增进了我们对TRD中抑制缺陷的理解，也为抑郁症的认知神经精神病学模型铺平了道路。
