Interaction between cognition and emotion in developmental psychopathology: the role of linguistic stimuli

Abstract

This Section of Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences regularly appears in each issue of the Journal to describe relevant studies investigating the relationship between neurobiology and psychosocial psychiatry in major psychoses. The aim of these Editorials is to provide a better understanding of the neural basis of psychopathology and clinical features of these disorders, in order to raise new perspectives in every-day clinical practice. Investigations on emotional words demonstrated that processing emotional information in child patients with anxiety disorders diagnosed for anxiety (generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder) or depression is biased towards pathology-related stimuli. Also, neuroimaging studies showed a failure of prefrontal areas in inhibiting the emotional reaction in children with bipolar disorder. Finally, despite several studies investigated memory and attention using emotional words, little is known about the development of emotional lexicon in both healthy and psychopathological children. The close interaction between emotion and cognition was suggested by behavioural and neuroimaging studies from both healthy and mentally ill individuals (e.g. Beck et al. 1979Beck et al. , 1985Isen et al. 1987;Williams et al. 1997;Bush et al. 2000). Cognitive processing of emotional material appears to be affected by pathology-coherent biases in individuals with emotional disorders (Beck et al. 1979(Beck et al. , 1985Bellani et al. 2011). Studies indicated that clinically depressed adults are keener on remembering negative/sad rather than positive material (e.g. Bradley et al. 1995), whereas anxious people show an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli (MacLeod et al. 1986). In addition, this bias seems to affect specific cognitive functions, but not others, in different psychiatric disorders. For instance, MacLeod et al. (1986) tested general anxiety disorder (GAD) and depressed adults with an emotional dot-probe detection task. The task consisted in detecting a dot that could appear in the same or different location as either an emotional threat-related or neutral word. They showed an attentional bias towards threat-related stimuli, if compared with the neutral condition, only in GAD (i.e. faster detection when the dot appeared in the same location as the threat-related word). The depressed patients, instead, attended equally to the emotional and neutral words (MacLeod et al. 1986). A lack of effect of negative emotional stimuli in depressed adults was confirmed in another study that used the same dot-probe (Email: marcella.bellani@univr.it, paolo.brambilla@uniud.it)Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences (2012), 21, 249-253.

Age-Dependent Changes of Thinking about Verbs

“…Some works focused on development of emotional words (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al, 2010). Words referring to feelings and affective states were widely used in studies investigating the modulation of emotions on cognitive processes, mainly focusing on attention and memory processes or executive functions, on healthy individuals and in mental illness, in populations of both children and adults (see Bellani et al, 2012 for a review). For instance emotional norms for more than 600 English words had been developed by Bradley and Lang (1999) and provided a set of verbal material to be used in studies on emotions on adults populations.…”

“…For instance emotional norms for more than 600 English words had been developed by Bradley and Lang (1999) and provided a set of verbal material to be used in studies on emotions on adults populations. Such emotional verbal stimuli had been also used in studies on the emotional bias on cognition in psychiatric patients, such as anxious, depressed, or bipolar patients, as well as in healthy volunteers, adults and children/adolescents (see Bellani et al, 2012 for a review).…”