Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA.
Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging. 2017 May 30;263:26-31. doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2017.03.002. Epub 2017 Mar 9.
Offspring of depressed parents are at significantly elevated risk for depressive disorders themselves; however, the specific mechanisms associated with this risk are not well known. Given the well-established link between parental depression and biased attention for negative stimuli in children, this preliminary study sought to examine the neural correlates of directing attention toward and away from emotional faces in children and adolescents in association with parent's current depressive symptoms. Forty-two youth (age 7-18 years) completed a task with conditions that manipulated whether participants were instructed to match emotional faces (explicit emotion processing) or match shapes in the context of emotional face distractors (implicit emotion processing) during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results revealed a positive correlation between parent depressive symptoms and youths' recruitment of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during attempts to direct attention away (implicit processing) from negative faces. These findings were maintained after accounting for current anxiety and depressive symptoms among youth suggesting that the findings were not fully attributable to offspring's psychopathology. These preliminary findings suggest that altered dorsal ACC function may contribute to the biased attention for negative information typically demonstrated in youth at high risk for depression by disrupting efficient inhibition of negative stimuli.
抑郁父母的子女自身患抑郁障碍的风险显著增加；然而，与这种风险相关的具体机制尚不清楚。鉴于父母抑郁与儿童对负性刺激的偏向注意之间存在明确的联系，本初步研究旨在探讨与父母当前抑郁症状相关的儿童和青少年将注意力指向和远离情绪面孔的神经相关性。42 名青少年（7-18 岁）在功能磁共振成像期间完成了一项任务，该任务通过操纵参与者是否被指示在情绪面孔的干扰下匹配情绪面孔（显性情绪处理）或匹配形状（隐性情绪处理）来进行。结果显示，父母的抑郁症状与青少年在试图将注意力从（隐性处理）负性面孔上转移开时背侧前扣带皮层（ACC）的招募呈正相关。这些发现与青少年当前的焦虑和抑郁症状存在显著关联，这表明这些发现并非完全归因于子女的精神病理学。这些初步发现表明，背侧 ACC 功能的改变可能通过干扰对负性刺激的有效抑制，导致对抑郁高风险青少年中常见的负性信息的偏向注意。
