Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T23:51:54.570Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Neural plasticity in response to attention training in anxiety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2009

S. Eldar*
Affiliation:
The Adler Center for Research in Child Developmental and Psychopathology, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Y. Bar-Haim
Affiliation:
The Adler Center for Research in Child Developmental and Psychopathology, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
*
*Address for correspondence: S. Eldar, M.A., The Adler Center for Research in Child Developmental and Psychopathology, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv69978, Israel. (Email: nitzansh@post.tau.ac.il)

Abstract

Background

Behavioral studies show that attention training can alter threat bias, influence vulnerability to stress and reduce clinical anxiety symptoms. The aim of this study was to examine which cognitive functions of attention processing are modulated by attention training, and how a priori anxiety interacts with the attention training procedure. Specifically, we expected modulation in the P1/N1 event-related potential (ERP) complex if early spatial attention was to be affected by training and modulation in later ERP components (P2, N2, P3) had training affected top-down attentional processes.

Method

Thirty anxious and 30 non-anxious adults performed a modified probe detection task. Electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded throughout for later ERP analyses. Half the participants in each anxiety group were randomly assigned to undergo a training procedure designed to divert their attention away from threat and the other half received placebo training.

Results

Anxious participants who were trained to avoid threat showed a linear reduction in response time (RT) to targets replacing neutral faces with the progression of training. This change in RT was not observed among non-anxious participants or among anxious participants who were exposed to placebo training. Following training, the anxious participants who were trained to avoid threat showed a reduction in P2 and P3 mean amplitudes and an enhancement in N2 mean amplitude.

Conclusions

Attention training affects anxious participants whereas non-anxious participants seem not to respond to it. The ERP data suggest that attention training modulates top-down processes of attention control rather than processes of early attention orienting.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amir, N (2009). Attention modification program in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 118, 2833.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Amir, N, McNally, R, Riemann, B, Burns, J (1996). Suppression of the emotional Stroop effect by increased anxiety in patients with social phobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy 34, 945948.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Amir, N, Weber, G, Beard, C, Bomyea, J, Taylor, CT (2008). The effect of a single session attention modification program on response to a public-speaking challenge in socially anxious individuals. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 117, 860868.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bar-Haim, Y, Lamy, D, Glickman, S (2005). Attentional bias in anxiety: a behavioral and ERP study. Brain and Cognition 59, 1122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bar-Haim, Y, Lamy, D, Pergamin, L, Bakermans-Kranenburg, MJ, van Ijendoorn, MH (2007). Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study. Psychological Bulletin 133, 124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bradley, BP, Mogg, K, Falla, SJ, Hamilton, LR (1998). Attention training for threatening facial expressions in anxiety: manipulation of sitmulus duration. Cognition and Emotion 12, 737753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, BP, Mogg, K, Millar, N, Bonham-Carter, C, Fergusson, E, Jenkins, J, Parr, M (1997). Attentional biases for emotional faces. Cognition and Emotion 11, 2542.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruin, KJ, Kenemans, JL, Verbaten, MN, Van der Heijden, AHC (2000). Habituation: an event-related potential and dipole source analysis study. International Journal of Psychophysiology 36, 199209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carretie, L, Hinojosa, JA, Mercado, F (2003). Cerebral patterns of attentional habituation to emotional visual stimuli. Psychophysiology 40, 381388.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carretie, L, Martin-Loeches, M, Hinojosa, JA, Mercado, F (2001 a). Emotion and attention interaction studied through event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 13, 11091128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carretie, L, Mercado, F, Tapia, M, Hinojosa, JA (2001 b). Emotion, attention and the ‘negativity bias’, studied through event-related potentials. International Journal of Psychophysiology 41, 7585.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, VP, Hillyard, SA (1996). Spatial selective attention affects early extrastriate but not striate components of the visual evoked potential. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 8, 387402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennis, TA, Chen, CC (2007 a). Emotional face processing and attention performance in three domains: neurophysiological mechanisms and moderating effects of trait anxiety. International Journal of Psychophysiology 65, 1019.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dennis, TA, Chen, CC (2007 b). Neurophysiological mechanisms in the emotional modulation of attention: the interplay between threat sensitivity and attentional control. Biological Psychology 76, 110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Pascalis, V, Strippoli, E, Riccardi, P, Vergari, F (2004). Personality, event-related potential (ERP) and heart rate (HR) in emotional word processing. Personality and Individual Differences 36, 873891.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eldar, S, Ricon, T, Bar-Haim, Y (2008). Plasticity in attention: implications for stress response in children. Behaviour Research and Therapy 46, 450461.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Falkenstein, M, Hohnsbein, J, Hoormann, J (1997). Time pressure effects on late components of the event-related potential (ERP). Journal of Psychophysiology 8, 2230.Google Scholar
Falkenstein, M, Hoormann, J, Hohnsbein, J (1999). ERP components in Go/Nogo tasks and their relation to inhibition. Acta Psychologica 101, 267291.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fichtenholtz, HM, Hopfinger, JB, Graham, R, Detwiler, JM, LaBar, KS (2007). Happy and fearful emotion in cues and targets modulate event-related potential indices of gaze-directed attentional orienting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, 323333.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Flostein, JR, Van Perren, C (2008). Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: a review. Psychophysiology 45, 152170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, D, Cycowicz, YM, Gaeta, H (2001). The novelty P3: an event-related brain potential (ERP) sign of the brain's evaluation of novelty. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 25, 355373.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hazen, RA, Vasy, MW, Schmidt, NB (2009). Attention retraining: a randomized clinical trial for pathological worry. Journal of Psychiatric Research 43, 627633.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heisz, JJ, Watter, S, Shedden, JM (2006). Progressive N170 habituation to unattended repeated faces. Vision Research 46, 4756.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Helfinstein, SM, White, LK, Bar-Haim, Y, Fox, NA (2008). Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals. Behaviour Research and Therapy 46, 799810.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hillyard, SA, Anllo-Vento, L (1998). Event-related brain potentials in the study of visual selective attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95, 781787.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hillyard, SA, Anllo-Vento, L, Clarck, VP, Heinze, H, Luck, SJ, Mangun, GR (1995). Neuroimaging approaches to the study of visual attention. In Converging Operations in the Study of Visual Selective Attention (ed. Kramer, A. F., Coles, M. G. H. and Logan, G. D.), pp. 107138. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Hillyard, SA, Kutas, M (1983). Electrophysiology of cognitive processing. Annual Review of Psychology 34, 3361.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Itier, RJ, Taylor, MJ (2002). Inversion and contrast polarity reversal affect both encoding and recognition processes of unfamiliar faces: a repetition study using ERPs. Neuroimage 15, 353372.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jasper, HH (1958). The ten-twenty electrode system of the International Federation. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 10, 371375.Google Scholar
Kotchoubey, B, Schneider, D, Uhlmann, C, Schleichert, H, Birbaumer, N (1997). Beyond habituation: long-term repetition effects on visual event-related potentials in epileptic patients. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 103, 450456.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kutas, M, McCarthy, G, Donchin, E (1977). Augmenting mental chronimetry: the P300 as a measure of stimulus evaluation time. Science 197, 792795.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lins, OG, Picton, TW, Berg, P, Scherg, M (1993). Ocular artifacts in EEG and event-related potentials. I: Scalp topography. Brain Topography 6, 5163.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luck, SJ, Heinze, HJ, Mangun, GR, Hillyard, SA (1990). Visual event-related potentials index focused attention within bilateral stimulus arrays: II. Functional dissociation of P1 and N1 components. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 75, 528542.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacLeod, C, Mathews, A, Tata, P (1986). Attentional bias in emotional disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95, 1520.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacLeod, C, Rutherford, E, Campbell, L, Ebsworthy, G, Holker, L (2002). Selective attention and emotional vulnerability: assessing the causal basis of their association through the experimental manipulation of attentional bias. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111, 107123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Magliero, A, Bashore, TR, Coles, MG, Donchin, E (1984). On the dependence of P300 latency on stimulus evaluation processes. Psychophysiology 21, 171186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mangun, GR (1995). The neural mechanisms of visual selective attention. Psychophysiology 32, 4–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mangun, GR, Buck, LA (1998). Sustained visual-spatial attention produces costs and benefits in response time and evoked neural activity. Neuropsychologia 36, 189200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mathews, A, MacLeod, C (2002). Induced processing biases have causal effects on anxiety. Cognition and Emotion 16, 331354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, G, Donchin, E (1981). A metric for thought: a comparison of P300 latency and reaction time. Science 211, 7779.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, A, Tomarken, AJ (2001). Task-dependent changes in frontal brain asymmetry: effects of incentive cues, outcome expectancies, and motor responses. Psychophysiology 38, 500511.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mogg, K, Bradley, BP (1998). A cognitive-motivational analysis of anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy 36, 809848.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mogg, K, Kentish, J, Bradley, BP (1993). Effects of anxiety and awareness on color-identification latencies for emotional words. Behaviour Research and Therapy 31, 559567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monk, CS, Nelson, EE, McClure, EB, Mogg, K, Bradley, BP, Leibenluft, E, Blair, RJR, Chen, G, Charney, DS, Ernst, M, Pine, DS (2006). Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation and attentional bias in response to angry faces in adolescents with generalized anxiety disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 163, 10911097.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naumann, E, Bartussek, D, Diedrich, O, Laufer, ME (1992). Assessing cognitive and affective information processing functions of the brain by means of the late positive complex of the event-related potential. Journal of Psychophysiology 6, 285298.Google Scholar
Navon, D, Margalit, B (1983). Allocation of attention according to informativeness in visual recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. A, Human Experimental Psychology 35, 497512.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pine, DS, Helfinstein, SM, Bar-Haim, Y, Nelson, E, Fox, NA (2009). Challenges in developing novel treatments for childhood disorders: lessons from research on anxiety. Neuropsychopharmacology 34, 213228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Polich, J (2007). Updating P300: an integrative theory of P3a and P3b. Clinical Neurophysiology 118, 21282148.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Santesso, DL, Meuret, AE, Hofmann, SG, Mueller, EM, Ratner, KG, Roesch, EB, Pizzagalli, DA (2008). Electrophysiological correlates of spatial orienting towards angry faces: a source localization study. Neuropsychologia 46, 13381348.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmidt, NB, Richey, JA, Buckner, JD, Timpano, KR (2009). Attention training for generalized social anxiety disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 118, 5–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Segalowitz, SJ, Wintink, AJ, Cudmore, LJ (2001). P3 topographical change with task familiarization and task complexity. Cognitive Brain Research 12, 451457.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shoji, H, Skrandies, W (2006). ERP topography and human perceptual learning in the peripheral visual field. International Journal of Psychophysiology 61, 179187.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Songwei, L, Jieqing, T, Mingyi, Q, Xinghua, L (2008). Continual training of attentional bias in social anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy 46, 905912.Google Scholar
Spielberger, CD, Gorsuch, RL, Lushene, R, Vagg, PR, Jacobs, GA (1983). Manual for the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory. Consulting Psychologists Press: Palo Alto, CA.Google Scholar
Tanaka, JW, Pierce, LJ (2009). The neural plasticity of other-race face recognition. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 9, 122231.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, JM, Mathews, A, MacLeod, C (1996). The emotional Stroop task and psychopathology. Psychological Bulletin 120, 3–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Xinying, L, Xuebing, L, Yue-Jia, L (2005). Anxiety and attentional bias for threat: an event-related potential study. Neuroreport 16, 15011505.Google Scholar
Yamaguchi, S, Tsuchiya, H, Kobayashi, S (1995). Electrophysiologic correlates of age effects on visuospatial attention shift. Cognitive Brain Research 3, 4149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Eldar supplementary material

Table.doc

Download Eldar supplementary material(File)
File 28.7 KB