Affective Processing and Emotion Regulation in Dysphoria and Depression: Cognitive Biases and Deficits in Cognitive Control

In this article, we take a closer look at the cognitive processing of emotional material in dysphoria and depression and link cognitive biases and deficits to individual differences in emotion regulation, an important risk factor for depression. Specifically, we propose that cognitive biases are associated with individual differences in the initial appraisal and reappraisal of emotion‐eliciting events. In addition, deficits in cognitive control result in prolonged processing of negative, goal‐irrelevant aspects of information as well as in decreased accessibility of mood‐incongruent material. These deficits further affect people’s ability to regulate negative affect by setting the stage for ruminative responses and by interfering with the use of reappraisal after the onset of an emotional response. This article provides a brief summary of findings that support these propositions and outlines implications for future research on the relation among affective processing, cognitive control, and emotion regulation in dysphoria and depression.     

Responding to symptoms of depression and anxiety: emotion regulation, neuroticism, and engagement in risky behaviors

The current study examined whether neuroticism, emotional regulation deficits, and/or their interaction predict increased engagement in risky behaviors following increases in symptoms of depression or anxiety over the course of 6 weeks. Results of hierarchical linear modeling analyses indicated that individuals who exhibited high levels of both neuroticism and emotional regulation deficits were more likely than other individuals to report increased engagement in risky behaviors following increases in symptoms of either depression or anxiety. Unexpectedly, individuals who exhibited high levels of neuroticism and adaptive emotion regulation strategies exhibited decreased engagement in risky behaviors following increases in depressive or anxious symptoms.     

Lack of an Attention Bias Away From Relatively Negative Faces in Dysphoria Is Not Related to Biased Emotion Identification

Eye-tracking-based attention research has consistently shown a lack of a normative attentional bias away from dysphoric face stimuli in depression, characterizing the attention system of non-depressed individuals. However, this more equal attention allocation pattern could also be related to biased emotion identification, namely, an inclination of depressed individuals to attribute negative emotions to non-negative stimuli when processing mood-congruent stimuli. Here, we examined emotion identification as a possible mechanism associated with attention allocation when processing emotional faces in depression. Attention allocation and emotion identification of participants with high (HD; n = 30) and low (LD; n = 30) levels of depression symptoms were assessed using two corresponding tasks previously shown to yield significant findings in depression, using the same face stimuli (sad, happy, and neutral faces) across both tasks. We examined group differences on each task and possible between-task associations. Results showed that while LD participants dwelled longer on relatively positive faces compared with relatively negative faces on the attention allocation task, HD participants showed no such bias, dwelling equally on both. Trait anxiety did not affect these results. No group differences were noted for emotion identification, and no between-task associations emerged. Present results suggest that depression is characterized by a lack of a general attention bias toward relatively positive faces over relatively negative faces, which is not related to a corresponding bias in emotion identification.     

自动化情绪调节策略对特质焦虑大学生应激反应的影响

研究采用句子整理任务诱发自动化情绪调节策略,特里尔社会应激测试模拟应激过程,以探讨认知重评和表达抑制对不同特质焦虑倾向大学生在应激状态下的影响。结果发现,自动化认知重评和表达抑制能获得适应性生理反应。自动化情绪调节策略适用于不同特质焦虑倾向的个体。特质焦虑对个体应激反应的影响主要体现在情绪体验上,高焦虑特质个体更易体验到焦虑情绪。但个体在压力性任务中的生理反应和行为表现不受特质焦虑因素的影响。     

Positive emotion impedes emotional but not cognitive conflict processing

Cognitive control enables successful goal-directed behavior by resolving a conflict between opposing action tendencies, while emotional control arises as a consequence of emotional conflict processing such as in irony. While negative emotion facilitates both cognitive and emotional conflict processing, it is unclear how emotional conflict processing is affected by positive emotion (e.g., humor). In 2 EEG experiments, we investigated the role of positive audiovisual target stimuli in cognitive and emotional conflict processing. Participants categorized either spoken vowels (cognitive task) or their emotional valence (emotional task) and ignored the visual stimulus dimension. Behaviorally, a positive target showed no influence on cognitive conflict processing, but impeded emotional conflict processing. In the emotional task, response time conflict costs were higher for positive than for neutral targets. In the EEG, we observed an interaction of emotion by congruence in the P200 and N200 ERP components in emotional but not in cognitive conflict processing. In the emotional conflict task, the P200 and N200 conflict effect was larger for emotional than neutral targets. Thus, our results show that emotion affects conflict processing differently as a function of conflict type and emotional valence. This suggests that there are conflict- and valence-specific mechanisms modulating executive control.     

Positive and Negative Family Emotional Climate Differentially Predict Youth Anxiety and Depression via Distinct Affective Pathways

A socioaffective specificity model was tested in which positive and negative affect differentially mediated relations of family emotional climate to youth internalizing symptoms. Participants were 134 7^th-9^th grade adolescents (65 girls; 86 % Caucasian) and mothers who completed measures of emotion-related family processes, experienced affect, anxiety, and depression. Results suggested that a family environment characterized by maternal psychological control and family negative emotion expressiveness predicted greater anxiety and depression, and was mediated by experienced negative affect. Conversely, a family emotional environment characterized by low maternal warmth and low positive emotion expressiveness predicted only depression, and was mediated through lowered experienced positive affect. This study synthesizes a theoretical model of typical family emotion socialization with an extant affect-based model of shared and unique aspects of anxiety and depression symptom expression.     

Emotional processing in psychopathic personality

Emotional‐processing deficits may be one of the characteristic features of impaired affect in individuals with psychopathy. These include shallowness and profound lack of remorse or empathy. Performances on standardized emotion discrimination tasks and mood induction tasks were compared between 17 patients with antisocial personality disorder (DSM‐IV) and 17 nonpsychopaths. Subjects with psychopathic personality demonstrated poorer performance on emotion‐discrimination tasks compared with controls. However, higher scores on factor “emotional detachment” of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL‐R) were associated with better discrimination ability. Subjective ratings were comparable between groups during mood induction. Although the findings support the hypothesis of a significant association between impaired emotional processing and psychopathy, they also suggest a relationship between emotional discrimination and the core personality features of psychopathy. Aggr. Behav. 28:394–400, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

负性情境诱导下抑郁个体的情绪Stroop效应：ERPs研究

运用ERPs技术探讨了正常和抑郁个体在中性和负性情境诱导下的情绪Stroop效应。结果发现正常被试在负性情境下对中性词判断的错误率比在中性情境下更高,对负性词加工的P1波幅减小、N1增大,出现了Stroop效应;抑郁被试在两种情境下对负性词加工的P1和 N1波幅没有差异。研究结果提示,抑郁个体在负性情境下出现注意脱离困难和资源不足,难以解决情绪冲突任务,支持了注意脱离损伤假说,并进一步说明抑郁个体的情绪选择性注意加工会受到心境一致性状态的影响,因过多的注意资源卷入从而出现负性情绪调节不良。实验结果为探讨抑郁个体对负性情绪的注意加工和调节过程提供了来自电生理的证据。     

Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals' awareness

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals' awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objectively or subjectively aware of masked facial stimuli varying in emotional expression. Crucially, target emotion was task irrelevant. We found that high trait-anxiety individuals required less sensory evidence (shorter stimulus exposure times) to become aware of the face targets. This anxiety-based difference was observed for fearful faces in all experiments, but with non-threat faces, it emerged only when these were presented among threatening faces. Our findings suggest a prominent role for affective context in high-anxiety individuals' conscious perception of visual stimuli. Possible mechanisms underlying the influence of context in lowering awareness thresholds in anxious individuals are discussed.     

Neuropsychological correlates of impaired emotion recognition following traumatic brain injury

Previous research has shown that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are significantly impaired on emotion recognition tasks. In this study, the relationship between neuropsychological functioning and emotion recognition was examined in 11 individuals with moderate to severe TBI and a control group of 13 individuals matched for age,sex, and education. Emotion recognition stimuli were from Ekman and Friesen's pictures of facial affect. The group with TBI showed neuropsychological deficits consistent with those commonly found following moderate to severe TBI. The group with TBI also identified significantly fewer emotion recognition stimuli than the control group.The number of correctly identified emotion recognition stimuli was significantly correlated with measures of verbal cognitive processing in the group with TBI. These findings suggest that the role of left hemisphere brain mechanisms in the recognition of facial (nonverbal)emotion may be more important than previously recognized.     

Adding fear to conflict: A general purpose cognitive control network is modulated by trait anxiety

Studies of cognitive control show that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in the detection and resolution of cognitive conflict. However, the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying emotional interference effects are less consistent. We used fMRI during emotional and nonemotional versions of a facial Stroop task to investigate the effects of emotional stimuli on cognitive control. In the full group there was limited evidence that different prefrontal circuits manage conflict arising from emotional and nonemotional distractors. However, individual differences in trait anxiety affected both behavioral performance and neural activity during the emotional task. Relative to low-anxiety (LA) subjects, high-anxiety (HA) subjects showed greater amygdala activity to task-relevant emotional information and impaired performance and greater conflict-related activity in the dACC when emotional content was task-irrelevant. Only LA subjects activated rostral ACC during the emotional task. This is consistent with cognitive models of individual differences that hypothesize deficient control of task-irrelevant emotional information in HA subjects. Additional behavioral and fMRI results from this study may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental.     

Cognitive biases in processing infant emotion by women with depression,anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder in pregnancy or after birth: A systematic review

Perinatal psychological problems such as post-natal depression are associated with poor mother–baby interaction, but the reason for this is not clear. One explanation is that mothers with negative mood have biased processing of infant emotion. This review aimed to synthesise research on processing of infant emotion by pregnant or post-natal women with anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Systematic searches were carried out on 11 electronic databases using terms related to negative affect, childbirth and perception of emotion. Fourteen studies were identified which looked at the effect of depression, anxiety and PTSD on interpretation of infant emotional expressions (k = 10), or reaction times when asked to ignore emotional expressions (k = 4). Results suggest mothers with depression and anxiety are more likely to identify negative emotions (i.e., sadness) and less accurate at identifying positive emotions (i.e., happiness) in infant faces. Additionally, women with depression may disengage faster from positive and negative infant emotional expressions. Very few studies examined PTSD (k = 2), but results suggest biases towards specific infant emotions may be influenced by characteristics of the traumatic event. The implications of this research for mother–infant interaction are explored.     

Emotion-cognition interaction in people at familial high risk for schizophrenia: the impact of sex differences

Cognitive deficits are fundamental to schizophrenia, and research suggests that negative emotion abnormally interferes with certain cognitive processes in those with the illness. To a lesser extent, cognitive impairment is found in persons at risk for schizophrenia, but there is limited research on the impact of emotion on cognitive processing in at-risk groups. It is unknown whether interference of negative emotion precedes illness and contributes to vulnerability for the disorder. We studied the extent to which negative emotional information interferes with working memory in 21 adolescent and young adult first-degree relatives of people with schizophrenia and 22 community controls. Groups were comparable in age, sex, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Primary measures were n-back tasks varying in cognitive load (1-back, 2-back, 3-back) with emotional faces (neutral, happy, fearful) as stimuli. The control group's response times (RTs) and the women's RTs, regardless of group, differed depending on the emotion condition. In contrast, the RTs of the relatives and of the men, regardless of group, did not differ by emotion. This study is the first to examine emotion-cognition interactions in relatives of individuals with schizophrenia. Reduced efficiency in processing emotional information may contribute to a greater vulnerability for schizophrenia that may be heightened in men. Additional research with larger samples of men and women is needed to test these preliminary findings.     

自动情绪调节对负性情绪面孔注意偏向的影响

本研究通过成语匹配任务启动情绪调节目标,在情绪flanker任务中考察了自动情绪调节启动对注意偏向的影响。结果表明,中性启动条件下,被试表现出对负性情绪面孔的注意偏向,而情绪调节启动条件下,被试对正性、负性情绪面孔的注意分配不存在显著差异。这一结果说明自动情绪调节可以有效地减弱被试的负性情绪面孔注意偏向。     

抑郁个体对社会反馈的加工：研究现状及存在问题

抑郁症伴随着严重的社会功能障碍。本文以“社会反馈”这一重要社会性信息为切入点,综述了抑郁症患者及抑郁倾向人群对社会反馈的体验、期待及情绪调节障碍的研究现状,发现抑郁个体对社会奖赏存在快感缺失,对社会排斥、社会拒绝等负性反馈表现出过敏化,对社会奖赏的期待降低,且可能存在情绪调节困难。目前此领域存在社会与非社会反馈神经机制的异同不清楚、异常脑区与社会反馈加工障碍的因果关系难以确定以及无法排除抑郁症患者和抑郁倾向人群存在不同社会反馈加工模式的可能性等问题。     

Utilizing an Ability-Based Measure to Detect Emotion Regulation Deficits in Generalized Anxiety Disorder

In recent years, the field of emotion regulation has advanced current conceptualizations of many forms of psychopathology. Difficulties with emotion regulation have been detected via self-report in several anxiety and depressive disorders, and in particular, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). However, there is a paucity of research examining emotion regulation ability in this population, leaving open the possibility that self-report measures reflect an individual’s perception of his/her emotion regulation skills rather than skills themselves. The present study examined the utility of an ability-based measure of emotional intelligence in the assessment of emotion-related deficits in GAD as well as the concordance between the ability-based measure and self-reports of emotion regulation skills. Results revealed that individuals with GAD demonstrated significantly more difficulty regulating their emotions than control participants did on both ability-based and self-report measures. Further, these measures showed a moderate concordance with each other. Findings suggest it will be important to integrate ability-based measurement of emotion-related deficits with other assessment modalities.     

Inhibitory control and negative emotional processing in psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder

The field of personality disorders has had a long-standing interest in understanding interactions between emotion and inhibitory control, as well as neurophysiological indices of these processes. More work in particular is needed to clarify differential deficits in offenders with antisocial personality disorder (APD) who differ on psychopathic traits, as APD and psychopathy are considered separate, albeit related, syndromes. Evidence of distinct neurobiological processing in these disorders would have implications for etiology-based personality disorder taxonomies in future psychiatric classification systems. To inform this area of research, we recorded event-related brain potentials during an emotional-linguistic Go/No-Go task to examine modulation of negative emotional processing by inhibitory control in three groups: psychopathy (n = 14), APD (n = 16), and control (n = 15). In control offenders, inhibitory control demands (No-Go vs. Go) modulated frontal-P3 amplitude to negative emotional words, indicating appropriate prioritization of inhibition over emotional processing. In contrast, the psychopathic group showed blunted processing of negative emotional words regardless of inhibitory control demands, consistent with research on emotional deficits in psychopathy. Finally, the APD group demonstrated enhanced processing of negative emotion words in both Go and No-Go trials, suggesting a failure to modulate negative emotional processing when inhibitory control is required. Implications for emotion-cognition interactions and putative etiological processes in these personality disorders are discussed.     

Cognitive bias in dizziness: emotional Stroop and autobiographical memories

Dizziness is commonly associated with anxiety, and is often caused by a dysfunction of the balance system. While a link between dizziness and both anxiety disorders and depression has been established, less is known about information processing in dizziness. In the first experiment we tested whether 15 patients with dizziness would display an emotional Stroop effect for panic-related words. Also included was a control group of 15 persons. The Stroop task was preceded by ratings of personal relevance of the Stroop words and followed by a surprise free recall of the words. Results showed a Stroop effect for panic-related words in the dizziness group, but the interaction did not reach significance (p = 0.08). Separate analysis of dizziness-related panic words however resulted in a significant group x condition interaction. In the free recall of Stroop words a main effect of word category was found, with more panic-related words being recalled. The second experiment investigated autobiographical memories in 14 patients with dizziness and 14 matched controls. Results showed a group x condition interaction with less specific memories being recalled following positive cue-words in the dizziness group. The overall pattern of results suggests that dizziness is related to deficits in information processing, which could be targeted in treatment.     

The attentional blink reveals sluggish attentional shifting in adolescents with specific language impairment

Rapid processing deficits have been the subject of much debate in the literature on specific language impairment (SLI). Hari and Renvall (2001) [Hari, R. & Renvall, H. (2001). Impaired processing of rapid stimulus sequences in dyslexia. Trends in cognitive sciences, 5, 525-532.] proposed that the source of this deficit can be attributed to sluggish attentional shifting abilities. That is, more time is required to shift attention between stimuli. To test this claim, 26 adolescents with SLI (divided into two subgroups to control for differences in non-verbal intelligence) and 14 controls were presented with a rapid serial visual presentation task. In this task participants were asked to detect two visual targets presented serially with distracter items with varying inter-target intervals (i.e., time difference between targets). This task was designed to elicit an attentional blink (AB). The AB describes the phenomenon whereby non-impaired individuals are less likely to report the second of two targets presented within 200-500ms of each other. After controlling for group differences in non-verbal intelligence, the SLI group was found to be significantly less accurate than the control group at successfully reporting the second target at inter-target intervals of 100, 200, 300, 400 and 800ms. The results were interpreted to suggest that adolescents with language impairments have an AB which differs from non-impaired individuals in both magnitude and duration.     

高社交焦虑个体对正性面孔的解释偏差

本研究采用情绪启动范式考察社交焦虑个体对正性刺激解释偏差。研究以正性和打碎的面孔为启动项,正性或负性非社交词为目标项,要求高社交焦虑组被试和控制组被试判断目标项的情感色彩,并记录其反应时与准确率。结果发现,两组被试具有不同的情绪启动模式：高焦虑组被试未表现出显著地相容性效应;他们在正性-正性条件下的反应时显著慢于控制组被试。研究结果提示高社交焦虑个体具有对正性社交刺激的解释偏差,他们不能充分理解正性社交刺激的积极含义。