Kishimoto Tomoko, Wen Xu, Li Mingzhu, Zhang Ru-Yuan, Yao Nisha, Huang Yunzhen, Qian Mingyi
Department of Social Psychology, Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, Tianjin, China.
Beijing Key Laboratory for Behavior and Mental Health, School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2021 Mar 31;12:636961. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.636961. eCollection 2021.
Despite the growing evidence for the attentional bias toward emotional related stimuli in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD), it remains unclear how the attentional bias manifests in normal individuals with SAD and/or depressive traits. To address this question, we recruited three groups of normal participants with different psychiatric traits-individuals with comorbid SAD and depression (SADd, = 19), individuals with only SAD (SAD, = 15), and healthy control individuals (HC, = 19). In a dot-probe paradigm, participants view angry, disgusted, and sad face stimuli with durations ranging from very brief (i.e., 14ms) that renders stimuli completely intangible, to relatively long (i.e., 2000ms) that guarantees image visibility. We find significant early vigilance (i.e., on brief stimuli) and later avoidance (i.e., on long stimuli) toward angry faces in the SADd group. We also find vigilance toward angry and disgusted faces in the SAD group. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to unify both vigilance and avoidance within the same experimental paradigm, providing direct evidence for the "vigilance-avoidance" theory of comorbid SAD and depression. In sum, these results provide evidence for the potential behavioral differences induced by anxiety-depression comorbidity and a single trait in non-clinical populations, but the lack of a depression-only group cannot reveal the effects of high levels of depression on the results. The limitations are discussed.
尽管越来越多的证据表明社交焦虑障碍（SAD）患者对与情绪相关的刺激存在注意偏向，但尚不清楚这种注意偏向在具有SAD和/或抑郁特质的正常个体中是如何表现的。为了解决这个问题，我们招募了三组具有不同精神特质的正常参与者——患有SAD和抑郁症的共病个体（SADd，n = 19）、仅患有SAD的个体（SAD，n = 15）和健康对照个体（HC，n = 19）。在点探测范式中，参与者观看愤怒、厌恶和悲伤的面部刺激，持续时间从非常短暂（即14毫秒）到相对较长（即2000毫秒）不等，短暂的刺激使图像完全难以辨认，而较长的刺激则保证图像可见。我们发现SADd组对愤怒面孔有显著的早期警觉（即对短暂刺激）和后期回避（即对长时间刺激）。我们还发现SAD组对愤怒和厌恶面孔有警觉。据我们所知，这是第一项在同一实验范式中统一警觉和回避的研究，为SAD和抑郁症共病的“警觉-回避 ”理论提供了直接证据。总之，这些结果为焦虑-抑郁共病和非临床人群中单一特质所导致的潜在行为差异提供了证据，但缺乏仅患有抑郁症的组无法揭示高水平抑郁对结果的影响。我们对局限性进行了讨论。
