Abstract
Previous studies have revealed that patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and affective disorders (such as depression and anxiety disorders) exhibit a vigilant attentional bias toward negative emotional stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether the change in an attentional bias for negative emotional stimuli can be induced by mental fatigue in healthy individuals. To address this question, we examined healthy participants’ (n = 27) performance in a visual probe task and emotional Stroop task before and after the mental-fatigue-inducing task. We demonstrated that acute mental fatigue induced by the long-lasting working memory task led to the alteration of cognitive processing of negative emotional information in the healthy volunteers.
Highlights
Fatigue is characterized by inefficiency in mental or physical activities and is commonly experienced in everyday modern life; large community surveys have reported that up to half of the general adult population complains of fatigue[1,2]
We hypothesised that recoverable fatigue was linked with attentional bias for negative emotional stimuli, and a change in the attentional bias for negative emotional stimuli was observed at the acute mental fatigue state. We investigated this hypothesis using the face dot-probe (FDP) task, which is a type of visual probe task, and the emotional Stroop task before and after two-back task, which can induce mental fatigue[25]
While performance on the mental-fatigue-inducing task was not significantly reduced (Table 1), it was previously shown that performance on another fatigue-evaluation task was significantly lower after the mental-fatigue-inducing task than before it[26], suggesting that acute mental fatigue is caused by attempting to maintain good working memory performance for a prolonged period[25]
Summary
Fatigue is characterized by inefficiency in mental or physical activities and is commonly experienced in everyday modern life; large community surveys have reported that up to half of the general adult population complains of fatigue[1,2]. In Japan, Matsuda et al.[8] reported that 26% and 7% of patients with CFS had lifetime comorbid MDD and panic disorder, respectively These are higher than the estimates of the lifetime prevalence of the general adult population (MDD: 16.6%, panic disorder: 4.7%, generalized anxiety disorder: 5.7%)[9]. Healthy individuals can generally cope with negative emotional stimuli by balancing top-down cognitive control with bottom-up cognitive processing. Numerous studies have revealed that patients with depression (e.g., Gotlib et al.[19]; Mitterschiffthaler et al.20) or anxiety (e.g., Becker et al.[21]; Mogg et al.22) show a vigilant attentional bias toward negative emotional stimuli, which, according to Beck’s cognitive model, is induced by negative schema activation. We used both these tasks in the present study to investigate whether the effect of fatigue on attentional bias varied depending on the task type
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