Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS), Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal.
William James Center for Research, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
Cogn Process. 2021 Aug;22(3):569-578. doi: 10.1007/s10339-021-01026-5. Epub 2021 Apr 2.
Breast cancer diagnosis can threaten fertility and biological motherhood in women of reproductive age due to the gonadotoxic effects of treatments. Much evidence documents these women fertility-related concerns and distress, but no study has attempted to understand how implicit cognitive processes can contribute to this maladjustment. In this research, we explored whether reproduction-related stimuli interfere with cognition among cancer survivors with infertility risk using an emotional Stroop task. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between reproduction-related cognitive processing and psychological morbidity. Young cancer survivors aged 18-40 years who received anticancer treatments and an age-matched non-cancer control group without known fertility problems were compared. Color-naming times and error rates were assessed. Participants in both groups were slower naming the color of reproduction-related words in comparison to unrelated negative valence words. Although in the same direction, this difference did not reach statistical significance for positive and neutral unrelated word lists. Further analysis suggested that biased attention toward reproduction-related information was associated with higher depression levels in young women with personal breast cancer history, but not in healthy women. These findings suggest that biased processing of reproduction-related cues might be a vulnerability factor after a breast cancer diagnosis. Additionally, this study puts in evidence the potential usefulness of using experimental tasks to investigate attentional bias in a context where fertility is at risk.
乳腺癌诊断可能会因治疗的性腺毒性作用而威胁到育龄妇女的生育能力和生物学母亲身份。大量证据证明了这些女性与生育相关的担忧和困扰，但没有研究试图了解内隐认知过程如何促成这种失调。在这项研究中，我们使用情绪 Stroop 任务探讨了具有不孕风险的癌症幸存者的生殖相关刺激是否会干扰认知。此外，我们还研究了生殖相关认知加工与心理发病率之间的关系。将接受抗癌治疗且年龄匹配、无已知生育问题的非癌症对照组的 18-40 岁年轻癌症幸存者进行比较。评估了颜色命名时间和错误率。与不相关的负性效价词相比，两组参与者在命名生殖相关词的颜色时都较慢。虽然方向相同，但对于正性和中性不相关词列表，这种差异没有达到统计学意义。进一步的分析表明，对生殖相关信息的注意力偏向与有个人乳腺癌病史的年轻女性的抑郁水平较高有关，而与健康女性无关。这些发现表明，生殖相关线索的偏向处理可能是乳腺癌诊断后的一个脆弱因素。此外，这项研究还证明了在生育风险背景下使用实验任务来研究注意力偏向的潜在有用性。
