Muench Hannah M, Westermann Stefan, Pizzagalli Diego A, Hofmann Stefan G, Mueller Erik M
Department of Psychology, University of Marburg, Gutenbergstr. 18, 35037 Marburg, Germany; Department of General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 410, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Fabrikstr. 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Biol Psychol. 2016 Dec;121(Pt B):194-202. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.07.017. Epub 2016 Jul 27.
Anxiety states are characterized by attentional biases to threat and increased early brain responses to potentially threat signaling stimuli. How such stimuli are processed further depends on prior learning experiences (e.g. conditioning and extinction) and the context in which a stimulus appears. Whether context information and prior learning experiences interact with early threat processing in humans is largely unknown. Here, EEG was recorded while healthy participants (N=20) viewed faces that were fear-conditioned and/or extinguished 24h before. Faces were either passively viewed or presented within different contexts, which were created by describing scenarios that could either involve participants directly (self-threatening), or made them observers (other-threatening) of a potentially dangerous situation. Early brain responses (i.e., P1 amplitudes) were specifically enhanced during the self-threatening condition in response to non-extinguished versus extinguished fear-conditioned faces. This finding suggests that top-down contextual information is incorporated into early attention modulation of previously learned threat signals.
焦虑状态的特征是对威胁的注意偏向以及大脑对潜在威胁信号刺激的早期反应增强。此类刺激如何进一步被处理取决于先前的学习经历（如条件作用和消退）以及刺激出现的情境。情境信息和先前学习经历是否会与人类早期的威胁处理相互作用，目前很大程度上尚不清楚。在此，研究人员记录了20名健康参与者在观看24小时前进行过恐惧条件化和/或消退处理的面部时的脑电图。面部要么是被被动观看，要么是在不同情境中呈现，这些情境是通过描述可能直接涉及参与者（自我威胁）或使他们成为潜在危险情况的观察者（他人威胁）的场景来创建的。在自我威胁条件下，与消退的恐惧条件化面部相比，对未消退的恐惧条件化面部的早期大脑反应（即P1波幅）会特别增强。这一发现表明，自上而下的情境信息被纳入到先前学习的威胁信号的早期注意调节中。
