Wauthia Erika, Rossignol Mandy
Service of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of MonsMons, Belgium; Fonds pour la Recherche en Sciences Humaines/Fonds National pour la Recherche ScientifiqueBrussels, Belgium.
Fonds pour la Recherche en Sciences Humaines/Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique Brussels, Belgium.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 3;7:562. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00562. eCollection 2016.
Anxiety disorders in adults have been associated with biased processing of emotional information which may be due to a deficit in attentional control. This deficit leads to an hypervigilance and a selective attention toward threatening information. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to study this topic in anxious adults. Similar biases have been reported in children with anxiety but researches investigating the ERPs components underpinning these biases are more scarce. However, the understanding of the neural correlates of attentional biases in anxious children seem quite important since they could play a role in the etiology and the maintenance of this disorder. This review summarizes the results of researches having used ERPs to index emotional processing and attention control in children suffering from anxiety. We will focus on the P1, indexing basic visual perceptual processing, the N2, thought to reflect cognitive control process, the P3 typically associated with response inhibition, and the late positive potential (LPP) that indicates sustained attention toward motivationally salient stimuli. We will also examine the error-related negativity (ERN) that indexes monitoring system for detecting errors. Electro-physiological studies generally reported increased amplitudes of these components in anxious children, even when they did not differ from typically developing children at a behavioral level. These results suggest diminished cognitive control that influences children's selective attention mechanisms toward threatening information. Theoretical perspectives and implications for future researches will be discussed in the framework of current models of childhood anxiety.
成人焦虑症与情绪信息的偏差处理有关，这可能是由于注意力控制缺陷所致。这种缺陷会导致过度警觉以及对威胁性信息的选择性关注。事件相关电位（ERP）已被用于研究焦虑成人的这一主题。在患有焦虑症的儿童中也报告了类似的偏差，但研究这些偏差背后的ERP成分的研究更为稀少。然而，了解焦虑儿童注意力偏差的神经相关性似乎非常重要，因为它们可能在这种疾病的病因和维持中起作用。这篇综述总结了使用ERP来评估焦虑儿童情绪处理和注意力控制的研究结果。我们将重点关注P1，它反映基本视觉感知处理；N2，被认为反映认知控制过程；P3通常与反应抑制相关；以及晚期正电位（LPP），它表明对动机显著刺激的持续关注。我们还将研究错误相关负波（ERN），它是检测错误的监测系统的指标。电生理研究通常报告，即使焦虑儿童在行为水平上与正常发育儿童没有差异，这些成分在他们身上的振幅也会增加。这些结果表明认知控制减弱，这影响了儿童对威胁性信息的选择性注意机制。将在当前儿童焦虑模型的框架内讨论理论观点和对未来研究的启示。
