Abstract
Mood and anxiety disorders are associated with deficits in attentional control involving emotive and non-emotive stimuli. Current theories focus on impaired attentional inhibition of distracting stimuli in producing these deficits. However, standard attention tasks struggle to separate distractor inhibition from target facilitation. Here, we investigate whether distractor inhibition underlies these deficits using neutral stimuli in a behavioral task specifically designed to tease apart these two attentional processes. Healthy participants performed a four-location Posner cueing paradigm and completed self-report questionnaires measuring depressive symptoms and trait anxiety. Using regression analyses, we found no relationship between distractor inhibition and mood symptoms or trait anxiety. However, we find a relationship between target facilitation and depression. Specifically, higher depressive symptoms were associated with reduced target facilitation in a task-version in which the target location repeated over a block of trials. We suggest this may relate to findings previously linking depression with deficits in predictive coding in clinical populations.
Highlights
Attention is a core cognitive mechanism for optimizing information processing and failures of attentional control over emotive as well as non-emotive stimuli are consistently found in mood and anxiety disorders (Bar-Haim et al, 2007; Eysenck et al, 2007; McDermott and Ebmeier, 2009; Marazziti et al, 2010; Peckham et al, 2010; Shi et al, 2019)
We examined the degree to which non-clinical trait anxiety and depression symptoms related to two key a priori cueing effects: distractor inhibition (TDn-target and distractor present (TDt)) in the blocked task, or target facilitation (TDn-TDt) in either flexible or blocked cueing task versions
Anxiety and depression scores were not predictive of distractor inhibition effects, with neither Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) nor STAI-T scores explaining a significant amount of task variance, no significant improvement over the null model by adding BDI-II or STAI-T, and the resulting models being nonsignificant in the blocked version [BDI: R2 = 0.001, R2 = −0.11, F(9,61) = 0.25, p = 0.98, BF01 = 1.81; STAI-T: R2 = 0.003, R2 = −0.10, F(9,61) = 0.27, p = 0.98, BF01 = 1.56]
Summary
Attention is a core cognitive mechanism for optimizing information processing and failures of attentional control over emotive as well as non-emotive stimuli are consistently found in mood and anxiety disorders (Bar-Haim et al, 2007; Eysenck et al, 2007; McDermott and Ebmeier, 2009; Marazziti et al, 2010; Peckham et al, 2010; Shi et al, 2019). Failures of attention can be attributed to several component mechanisms (e.g., facilitation of goal-relevant information and/or inhibition of distractors) and disentangling their relative contribution to failures of attention in mood and anxiety disorders may be critical to understanding the etiology and developing effective treatments (Clarke et al, 2013). An increasing body of literature suggests attentional deficits in mood and anxiety disorders are not always specific to emotive or disorder-relevant stimuli (“hot cognition”), but may reflect more general impairments in “cold cognition” including attentional control (Fox, 1994; Eysenck et al, 2007; Bishop, 2009; McDermott and Ebmeier, 2009; Marazziti et al, 2010; Roiser and Sahakian, 2013)
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