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.
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.
Authors: Vanessa M Brown; Lusha Zhu; John M Wang; B Christopher Frueh; Brooks King-Casas; Pearl H Chiu Journal: Elife Date: 2018-01-09 Impact factor: 8.140
Authors: Sarah M Wilson; Marketa Krenek; Paul A Dennis; Samantha S Yard; Kendall C Browne; Tracy L Simpson Journal: Psychol Addict Behav Date: 2017-01-09
Authors: Brian M Iacoviello; Gang Wu; Rany Abend; James W Murrough; Adriana Feder; Eyal Fruchter; Yoav Levinstein; Ilan Wald; Christopher R Bailey; Daniel S Pine; Alexander Neumeister; Yair Bar-Haim; Dennis S Charney Journal: J Trauma Stress Date: 2014-03-06
Authors: Brett Froeliger; Leslie A Modlin; Rachel V Kozink; Lihong Wang; Eric L Garland; Merideth A Addicott; F Joseph McClernon Journal: Psychiatry Res Date: 2012-11-13 Impact factor: 3.222
Authors: Micah Allen; Martin Dietz; Karina S Blair; Martijn van Beek; Geraint Rees; Peter Vestergaard-Poulsen; Antoine Lutz; Andreas Roepstorff Journal: J Neurosci Date: 2012-10-31 Impact factor: 6.167