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Biased emotional attention in post-traumatic stress disorder: a help as well as a hindrance?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2007

M. VYTHILINGAM ,
K. S. BLAIR ,
D. McCAFFREY ,
M. SCARAMOZZA ,
M. JONES ,
M. NAKIC ,
K. MONDILLO ,
K. HADD ,
O. BONNE  and
D. G. V. MITCHELL
...Show all authors
M. VYTHILINGAM
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
K. S. BLAIR
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
D. McCAFFREY
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
M. SCARAMOZZA
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
M. JONES
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
M. NAKIC
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
K. MONDILLO
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
K. HADD
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
O. BONNE
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Hadassah-Hebrew-University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel
D. G. V. MITCHELL
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychiatry and Anatomy & Cell Biology, University of Western Ontario, Canada
D. S. PINE
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
D. S. CHARNEY
Affiliation:
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
R. J. R. BLAIR*
Affiliation:
Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD, USA
*
*Address for correspondence: Dr James Blair, Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, 15K North Drive, MSC 2670, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. (Email: blairj@intra.nimh.nih.gov)
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Abstract

Background

From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the emotional attentional bias in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be conceptualized either as emotional hyper-responsiveness or as reduced priming of task-relevant representations due to dysfunction in ‘top-down’ regulatory systems. We investigated these possibilities both with respect to threatening and positive stimuli among traumatized individuals with and without PTSD.

Method

Twenty-two patients with PTSD, 21 trauma controls and 20 non-traumatized healthy participants were evaluated on two tasks. For one of these tasks, the affective Stroop task (aST), the emotional stimuli act as distracters and interfere with task performance. For the other, the emotional lexical decision task (eLDT), emotional information facilitates task performance.

Results

Compared to trauma controls and healthy participants, patients with PTSD showed increased interference for negative but not positive distracters on the aST and increased emotional facilitation for negative words on the eLDT.

Conclusions

These findings document that hyper-responsiveness to threat but not to positive stimuli is specific for patients with PTSD.

Type
Original Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 37 , Issue 10 , October 2007 , pp. 1445 - 1455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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