Investigation of attentional bias in obsessive compulsive disorder with and without depression in visual search

Copyright: © 2013 Morein-Zamir et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedWhether Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is associated with an increased attentional bias to emotive stimuli remains controversial. Additionally, it is unclear whether comorbid depression modulates abnormal emotional processing in OCD. This study examined attentional bias to OC-relevant scenes using a visual search task. Controls, non-depressed and depressed OCD patients searched for their personally selected positive images amongst their negative distractors, and vice versa. Whilst the OCD groups were slower than healthy individuals in rating the images, there were no group differences in the magnitude of negative bias to concern-related scenes. A second experiment employing a common set of images replicated the results on an additional sample of OCD patients. Although there was a larger bias to negative OC-related images without pre-exposure overall, no group differences in attentional bias were observed. However, OCD patients subsequently rated the images more slowly and more negatively, again suggesting post-attentional processing abnormalities. The results argue against a robust attentional bias in OCD patients, regardless of their depression status and speak to generalized difficulties disengaging from negative valence stimuli. Rather, post-attentional processing abnormalities may account for differences in emotional processing in OCD.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

On the role of goal relevance in emotional attention: Disgust evokes early attention to cleanliness

Prior evidence has shown that aversive emotional states are characterised by an attentional bias towards aversive events. The present study investigated whether aversive emotions also bias attention towards stimuli that represent means by which the emotion can be alleviated. We induced disgust by having participants touch fake disgusting objects. Participants in the control condition touched nondisgusting objects. The results of a subsequent dot-probe task revealed that attention was oriented to disgusting pictures irrespective of condition. However, participants in the disgust condition also oriented towards pictures representing cleanliness. These findings suggest that the deployment of attention in aversive emotional states is not purely stimulus driven but is also guided by the goal to alleviate this emotional state

Attentional control theory in childhood: enhanced attentional capture by non-emotional and emotional distractors in anxiety and depression

Attentional control theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is associated with executive functioning deficits. The theory has been widely investigated in adults. The current study tested whether symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression were associated with experimentally measured attentional control in the context of non-emotional and emotional stimuli. Sixty-one children (mean age = 9.23 years, range = 8.39 - 10.41) reported their trait anxiety and depression symptoms and completed three visual search tasks. The tasks used a variant of an irrelevant singleton paradigm and measured attentional capture by task-irrelevant non-emotional (color) and emotional (facial expressions) distractors. Significant attentional capture by both non-emotional and emotional distractors was observed, and was significantly correlated with trait anxiety and symptoms of depression. The strength of relationship between attentional capture and the symptoms did not differ significantly for non-emotional and emotional distractors. The results suggest that symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression are associated with poorer attentional control both in the presence of emotional and non-emotional stimuli, supporting ACT in younger populations. This attentional deficit in the context of non-emotional information might be as central to childhood internalizing symptoms as attentional biases often observed on tasks investigating processing of emotional stimuli

Social Anxiety Modulates Subliminal Affective Priming

BACKGROUND: It is well established that there is anxiety-related variation between observers in the very earliest, pre-attentive stage of visual processing of images such as emotionally expressive faces, often leading to enhanced attention to threat in a variety of disorders and traits. Whether there is also variation in early-stage affective (i.e. valenced) responses resulting from such images, however, is not yet known. The present study used the subliminal affective priming paradigm to investigate whether people varying in trait social anxiety also differ in their affective responses to very briefly presented, emotionally expressive face images. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants (n = 67) completed a subliminal affective priming task, in which briefly presented and smiling, neutral and angry faces were shown for 10 ms durations (below objective and subjective thresholds for visual discrimination), and immediately followed by a randomly selected Chinese character mask (2000 ms). Ratings of participants' liking for each Chinese character indicated the degree of valenced affective response made to the unseen emotive images. Participants' ratings of their liking for the Chinese characters were significantly influenced by the type of face image preceding them, with smiling faces generating more positive ratings than neutral and angry ones (F(2,128) = 3.107, p<0.05). Self-reported social anxiety was positively correlated with ratings of smiling relative to neutral-face primed characters (Pearson's r = .323, p<0.01). Individual variation in self-reported mood awareness was not associated with ratings. CONCLUSIONS: Trait social anxiety is associated with individual variation in affective responding, even in response to the earliest, pre-attentive stage of visual image processing. However, the fact that these priming effects are limited to smiling and not angry (i.e. threatening) images leads us to propose that the pre-attentive processes involved in generating the subliminal affective priming effect may be different from those that generate attentional biases in anxious individuals

Efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a web-based and mobile stress-management intervention for employees: design of a randomized controlled trial

Background: Work-related stress is associated with a variety of mental and emotional problems and can lead to substantial economic costs due to lost productivity, absenteeism or the inability to work. There is a considerable amount of evidence on the effectiveness of traditional face-to-face stress-management interventions for employees; however, they are often costly, time-consuming, and characterized by a high access threshold. Web-based interventions may overcome some of these problems yet the evidence in this field is scarce. This paper describes the protocol for a study that will examine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of a web-based guided stress-management training which is based on problem solving and emotion regulation and aimed at reducing stress in adult employees. Methods. The study will target stressed employees aged 18 and older. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) design will be applied. Based on a power calculation of d=.35 (1-β of 80%, α =.05), 264 participants will be recruited and randomly assigned to either the intervention group or a six-month waitlist control group. Inclusion criteria include an elevated stress level (Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale-10 ≥ 22) and current employment. Exclusion criteria include risk of suicide or previously diagnosed psychosis or dissociative symptoms. The primary outcome will be perceived stress, and secondary outcomes include depression and anxiety. Data will be collected at baseline and seven weeks and six months after randomization. An extended follow up at 12 months is planned for the intervention group. Moreover, a cost-effectiveness analysis will be conducted from a societal perspective and will include both direct and indirect health care costs. Data will be analyzed on an intention-to-treat basis and per protocol. Discussion. The substantial negative consequences of work-related stress emphasize the necessity for effective stress-management trainings. If the proposed internet intervention proves to be (cost-) effective, a preventative, economical stress-management tool will be conceivable. The strengths and limitations of the present study are discussed. Trial registration. German Register of Clinical Studies (DRKS): DRKS00004749. © 2013 Heber et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

The effect of disgust-related side-effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety in people treated for cancer: a moderated mediation model

As maladaptive disgust responses are linked to mental health problems, and cancer patients may experience heightened disgust as a result of treatments they receive, we explored the associations between disgust-related side-effects and symptoms of depression and anxiety in people treated for cancer. One hundred and thirty two (83 women, Mage = 57.48 years) participants answered questions about their treatments, side-effects, disgust responding, and mental health. Experiencing bowel and/or bladder problems, sickness and/or nausea (referred to here as “core” disgust-related side-effects) was significantly related to greater symptoms of depression and borderline increased anxiety. Further, these links were explained by a moderated mediation model, whereby the effects of core disgust side-effects on depression and anxiety were mediated by (physical and behavioural) self-directed disgust, and disgust propensity moderated the effect of core disgust side-effects on self-disgust. These findings stress the importance of emotional responses, like disgust, in psychological adaptation to the side-effects of cancer treatments

Neuroimaging-Based Classification of PTSD Using Data-Driven Computational Approaches:A Multisite Big Data Study from the ENIGMA-PGC PTSD Consortium

BACKGROUND: Recent advances in data-driven computational approaches have been helpful in devising tools to objectively diagnose psychiatric disorders. However, current machine learning studies limited to small homogeneous samples, different methodologies, and different imaging collection protocols, limit the ability to directly compare and generalize their results. Here we aimed to classify individuals with PTSD versus controls and assess the generalizability using a large heterogeneous brain datasets from the ENIGMA-PGC PTSD Working group.METHODS: We analyzed brain MRI data from 3,477 structural-MRI; 2,495 resting state-fMRI; and 1,952 diffusion-MRI. First, we identified the brain features that best distinguish individuals with PTSD from controls using traditional machine learning methods. Second, we assessed the utility of the denoising variational autoencoder (DVAE) and evaluated its classification performance. Third, we assessed the generalizability and reproducibility of both models using leave-one-site-out cross-validation procedure for each modality.RESULTS: We found lower performance in classifying PTSD vs. controls with data from over 20 sites (60% test AUC for s-MRI, 59% for rs-fMRI and 56% for d-MRI), as compared to other studies run on single-site data. The performance increased when classifying PTSD from HC without trauma history in each modality (75% AUC). The classification performance remained intact when applying the DVAE framework, which reduced the number of features. Finally, we found that the DVAE framework achieved better generalization to unseen datasets compared with the traditional machine learning frameworks, albeit performance was slightly above chance.CONCLUSION: These results have the potential to provide a baseline classification performance for PTSD when using large scale neuroimaging datasets. Our findings show that the control group used can heavily affect classification performance. The DVAE framework provided better generalizability for the multi-site data. This may be more significant in clinical practice since the neuroimaging-based diagnostic DVAE classification models are much less site-specific, rendering them more generalizable.</p