Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Connectome and Behavior, CAS Key Laboratory of Brain Connectome and Manipulation, The Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute (BCBDI), Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science-Shenzhen Fundamental Research Institutions, Shenzhen, 518055, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 May 24;33(11):7288-7296. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad038.
Behavioral evidence shows that individuals with high trait anxiety tend to be distracted by irrelevant stimulation not only for threat-related stimuli but also for non-emotional neutral stimuli. These findings suggest that there may be a general deficit of attentional control in trait anxiety. However, the neural mechanism underlying the anxiety-related deficit in attentional control, especially inhibition function, is still unclear. Here, we examined the attentional processing of the non-emotional neutral distractor on 66 young adults with different levels of trait anxiety, using the ERP indices of attentional selection (N2pc) and top-down inhibition (Pd) in a search task with geometric stimuli. We found that the distractor-evoked N2pc amplitude did not vary with anxiety levels, but increased anxiety was associated with smaller Pds (i.e. worse inhibition). Besides, delayed attentional selection of targets was associated with higher anxiety levels. These correlations of trait anxiety remained significant even after controlling for state anxiety, and state anxiety did not affect the attentional processing of distractors and targets, suggesting that trait anxiety, not current anxiety, affects attentional function. Our findings clarify the mechanism underlying the general attentional deficits in trait anxiety, e.g. reduced distractor inhibition and delayed target selection.
行为证据表明，高特质焦虑个体不仅容易受到威胁相关刺激的干扰，而且容易受到非情绪中性刺激的干扰。这些发现表明，特质焦虑可能存在注意力控制的普遍缺陷。然而，焦虑相关注意力控制缺陷的神经机制，特别是抑制功能，仍然不清楚。在这里，我们使用几何刺激搜索任务中的注意力选择（N2pc）和自上而下抑制（Pd）的 ERP 指标，检查了不同特质焦虑水平的 66 名年轻成年人对非情绪中性分心物的注意力处理。我们发现，分心物诱发的 N2pc 振幅并不随焦虑水平而变化，但随着焦虑程度的增加，Pd 减小（即抑制作用越差）。此外，目标的注意力选择延迟与较高的焦虑水平有关。即使在控制状态焦虑后，这些特质焦虑的相关性仍然显著，并且状态焦虑并不影响分心物和目标的注意力处理，这表明特质焦虑而不是当前焦虑会影响注意力功能。我们的研究结果阐明了特质焦虑中一般注意力缺陷的机制，例如抑制能力下降和目标选择延迟。
