Neural correlates of suspiciousness and interactions with anxiety during emotional and neutral word processing

Abstract

Suspiciousness is usually classified as a symptom of psychosis, but it also occurs in depression and anxiety disorders. Though how suspiciousness overlaps with depression is not obvious, suspiciousness does seem to overlap with anxious apprehension and anxious arousal (e.g., verbal iterative processes and vigilance about environmental threat). However, suspiciousness also has unique characteristics (e.g., concern about harm from others and vigilance about social threat). Given that both anxiety and suspiciousness have been associated with abnormalities in emotion processing, it is unclear whether it is the unique characteristics of suspiciousness or the overlap with anxiety that drive abnormalities in emotion processing. Event-related brain potentials were obtained during an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that suspiciousness interacts with anxious apprehension to modulate initial stimulus perception processes. Suspiciousness is associated with attention to all stimuli regardless of emotion content. In contrast, anxious arousal is associated with a later response to emotion stimuli only. These results suggest that suspiciousness and anxious apprehension share overlapping processes, but suspiciousness alone is associated with a hyperactive early vigilance response. Depression did not interact with suspiciousness to predict response to emotion stimuli. These findings suggest that it may be informative to assess suspiciousness in conjunction with anxiety in order to better understand how these symptoms interact and contribute to dysfunctional emotion processing.

Childhood abuse history and attention bias in adults

“…For the dimensional analysis approach, multivariate multiple linear regressions were conducted to examine the impact of childhood abuse severity (as a continuous measure) on RT for correct trials and on ERP amplitude scores for each component. This approach, similar to that of Fisher et al (2014), allows multiple dependent variables to be entered into a common inferential model, accounting for covariance among the predictors across ERP components (see Figure 1). Predictors included in each of the ERP component models were total abuse severity (composite of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse CTQ scores, log-transformed due to skewness) and psychopathology symptoms (anxious arousal, anxious apprehension, and anhedonic depression scores).…”

“…This Stroop task was selected because it is a commonly used measure of attention bias (for review see Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Van Ijzendoorn, 2007), is designed for compatibility with ERP measurement (see Sass et al, 2010), and requires active rather than passive responding, which addresses a notable limitation of previous literature discussed above. The version of the emotion-word Stroop task that was used in the present study is a well-validated version that has been used in several ERP studies (Fisher et al, 2010(Fisher et al, , 2014Sass et al, 2010Sass et al, , 2014Stewart et al, 2010). In this version of the emotion-word Stroop task, a pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant word is presented in color on a computer screen, and individuals are instructed to respond to the color of the word while ignoring the task-irrelevant word meaning.…”

Editorial: Behavioral and physiological bases of attentional biases: paradigms, participants, and stimuli

“…Focusing on the exact time course of neuronal activation, four studies investigated attentional biases using electroencephalography and measured attention-related event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to emotional and neutral stimuli. Sass et al ( 2014 ) and Fisher et al ( 2014 ) applied an emotion word Stroop task while Pfabigan et al ( 2014 ) and Kappenman et al ( 2014 ) administered versions of the dot-probe task. These studies investigated several attention-related ERPs time-locked to crucial events during the paradigms—pointing toward the huge diversity in measures used to assess attentional biases.…”

“…Only when utilizing word stimuli, evidence of trauma-related attentional biases among participants with PTSD could be replicated, highlighting that attentional biases may sometimes depend on the type of stimuli used. Fisher et al ( 2014 ) examined subclinical samples, investigating the moderating effect of suspiciousness on attentional biases in anxiety and depression. Utilizing word stimuli, there was evidence of overlapping processes for suspiciousness and anxious apprehension, but not for suspiciousness and depression.…”

Large-Scale Network Dynamics of Visual Working Memory

“…The network configurations that accompany arousal and apprehension can therefore be used as a starting point to consider what differential constraints might exist in both cases, and to predict how these constraints influence behavioural performance. In the case of anxious arousal, activation increases in the ventral attention/salience network: as locus coreolus activity and noradrenaline increase (particularly to the right hemisphere), activity increases in the right anterior insula, Critchley, 2009;Etkin & Wager, 2007;Fisher et al, 2014;Meyer, Strittmatter, Fischer, Georg, & Schmitz, 2004) and functional connectivity increases between areas of the ventral attention network (i.e., between the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and surrounding regions of the temporoparietal and occipital cortices (Greene & Soto, 2014) (Greene & Soto, 2014)), and between the right anterior cingulate and regions of dorsal attention and central executive networks (including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right posterior parietal cortex in particular Sridharan et al, 2008)). Interestingly, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has also recently been suggested to play a role in regulation of ventral attention network activity based on the clinical observation that chronic hypoactivity in this region leads to over activity of the ventral attention network.…”