Joscelyn E. Fisher

Emotion-Modulated Performance and Activity in Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex

Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to examine the relationship between processing of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli and activity in prefrontal cortex. Twenty volunteers identified the colors in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were printed. Pleasant words prompted more activity bilaterally in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) than did unpleasant words. In addition, pleasant words prompted more activity in left than in right DLPFC. Response speed to pleasant words was correlated with DLPFC activity. These data directly link positive affect, enhanced performance, and prefrontal activity, providing some of the first fMRI evidence supporting models of emotional valence and frontal brain asymmetry based on electroencephalography (EEG).

Time course of attentional bias in anxiety: Emotion and gender specificity

Anxiety is characterized by cognitive biases, including attentional bias to emotional (especially threatening) stimuli. Accounts differ on the time course of attention to threat, but the literature generally confounds emotional valence and arousal and overlooks gender effects, both addressed in the present study. Nonpatients high in self-reported anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, or neither completed an emotion-word Stroop task during event-related potential (ERP) recording. Hypotheses differentiated time course of preferential attention to emotional stimuli. Individuals high in anxious apprehension and anxious arousal showed distinct early ERP evidence of preferential processing of emotionally arousing stimuli along with some evidence for gender differences in processing. Healthy controls showed gender differences at both early and later processing stages. The conjunction of valence, arousal, and gender is critical in the time course of attentional bias.

Neural mechanisms of affective interference in schizotypy

Negatively valenced stimuli foster cognitive impairment in schizotypy and schizophrenia. To identify relevant brain mechanisms, the authors had 16 positive-schizotypy and 16 control participants perform an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of negative and neutral words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regional brain activity. Schizotypy individuals showed increased right and decreased left activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a deficit in maintenance of attentional set in the presence of negative emotional distractors. They also showed abnormal activity in ventral limbic areas, including decreased activity in nucleus accumbens and increased activity in hippocampus and amygdala, a circuit involved in the integration of cognitive and affective processes. These results indicate that aspects of emotion-cognition processes and the brain mechanisms that implement them are similar in schizotypy and schizophrenia.

Attentional bias to negative emotion as a function of approach and withdrawal anger styles: an ERP investigation.

Although models of emotion have focused on the relationship between anger and approach motivation associated with aggression, anger is also related to withdrawal motivation. Anger-out and anger-in styles are associated with psychopathology and may disrupt the control of attention within the context of negatively valenced information. The present study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine whether anger styles uniquely predict attentional bias to negative stimuli during an emotion-word Stroop task. High anger-out predicted larger N200, P300, and N400 to negative words, suggesting that aggressive individuals exert more effort to override attention to negative information. In contrast, high anger-in predicted smaller N400 amplitude to negative words, indicating that negative information may be readily available (primed) for anger suppressors, requiring fewer resources. Individuals with an anger-out style might benefit from being directed away from provocative stimuli that might otherwise consume their attention and foster overt aggression. Findings indicating that anger-out and anger-in were associated with divergent patterns of brain activity provide support for distinguishing approach- and withdrawal-related anger styles.

Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression.

An individuals self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials while individuals reporting features of anxiety and depression completed an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, and depression were associated with self-reported emotion abilities, consistent with prior literature. In addition, lower anxious apprehension and greater reported emotional clarity were related to slower processing of negative stimuli indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Higher anxious arousal and reported attention to emotion were associated with ERP evidence of early attention to all stimuli regardless of emotional content. Reduced later engagement with stimuli was also associated with anxious arousal and with clarity of emotions. Depression was not differentially associated with any emotion processing stage indexed by ERPs. Research in this area may lead to the development of therapies that focus on minimization of anxiety to foster successful emotion regulation.

Specificity of emotion-related effects on attentional processing in schizotypy.

OBJECTIVES In the schizophrenia spectrum, cognitive functions such as perception, language, and attention have been shown to be adversely influenced by negative affect. The present study addressed three issues of specificity and one issue of mechanism regarding affect-related attentional disruption in schizotypy: (1) Is attentional disturbance from negative affective stimuli specific to positive (PS) but not negative schizotypy (NS)? (2) Do positive affective stimuli also foster attentional disturbance? (3) Are anxiety and depression differentially related to PS and NS? (4) Whatever the degree of specificity in these relationships, does anxiety mediate the relationship between schizotypy and attentional disturbance? METHODS Nonpatient participants (N=162) provided responses on scales of schizotypy, anxiety, and depression and performed an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of positive, neutral, and negative words. RESULTS PS but not NS was associated with poorer attentional performance. This attentional disturbance was specific to negative words. PS was associated with anxiety and depression, whereas NS was associated only with depression. Finally, anxiety and depression did not fully mediate the relationship between PS and attentional interference related to negative affective stimuli. CONCLUSIONS Findings of attentional disturbance in the presence of negative affective stimuli, particularly in positive schizotypy, have substantial theoretical implications. They provide a path by which the interplay of cognitive and affective phenomena could lead to the formation, maintenance, and exacerbation of positive symptoms, including delusions and hallucinations. Findings from this study also underscore the importance of examining the differential contribution of comorbid anxiety and depression to cognitive and affective function in the schizophrenia spectrum.

Performance of DSM-5 Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder Criteria in a Community Sample of Bereaved Military Family Members

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article was to examine the accuracy of DSM-5 proposed criteria for persistent complex bereavement disorder in identifying putative cases of clinically impairing grief and in excluding nonclinical cases. Performance of criteria sets for prolonged grief disorder and complicated grief were similarly assessed. METHOD Participants were family members of U.S. military service members who died of any cause since September 11, 2001 (N=1,732). Putative clinical and nonclinical samples were derived from this community sample using cutoff scores from the Inventory of Complicated Grief and the Work and Social Adjustment Scale. Items from a self-report grief measure (Complicated Grief Questionnaire) were matched to DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder, prolonged grief disorder, and complicated grief criteria. Endorsed items were used to identify cases. RESULTS Criteria sets varied in their ability to identify clinical cases. DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder criteria identified 53%, prolonged grief disorder criteria identified 59%, and complicated grief criteria identified more than 90% of putative clinical cases. All criteria sets accurately excluded virtually all nonclinical grief cases and accurately excluded depression in the absence of clinical grief. CONCLUSIONS The DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder criteria accurately exclude nonclinical, normative grief, but also exclude nearly half of clinical cases, whereas complicated grief criteria exclude nonclinical cases while identifying more than 90% of clinical cases. The authors conclude that significant modification is needed to improve case identification by DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder diagnostic criteria. Complicated grief criteria are superior in accurately identifying clinically impairing grief.

Semantic associations, lateralized frontal function, and context maintenance in schizotypy

Symptom heterogeneity within conventional diagnostic groups is fostering a growing focus on narrower symptom profiles to identify psychological and biological mechanisms in psychopathology. Positive symptoms of schizophrenia are associated with context maintenance deficits, which in turn have been linked to frontal-lobe function. Frontal- and temporal-lobe brain dysfunction is also well documented in schizophrenia. The present study (N=36) examined how context and memory deficits are associated with subclinical symptoms in schizotypy by investigating the relationship between symptom reports, neuropsychological performance, and several facets of recognition memory. Context maintenance was probed via lures suggested by presented verbal material. Frontal brain function and positive symptom schizotypy predicted accuracy for lures, whereas posterior brain function and low positive affect predicted accuracy for distracters. This pattern of findings establishes continuity in disruption of context maintenance in clinical and subclinical populations.

Electrophysiological evidence of the time course of attentional bias in non-patients reporting symptoms of depression with and without co-occurring anxiety

Anxiety is characterized by attentional biases to threat, but findings are inconsistent for depression. To address this inconsistency, the present study systematically assessed the role of co-occurring anxiety in attentional bias in depression. In addition, the role of emotional valence, arousal, and gender was explored. Ninety-two non-patients completed the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Meyer et al., 1990; Molina and Borkovec, 1994) and portions of the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (Watson et al., 1995a,1995b). Individuals reporting high levels of depression and low levels of anxiety (depression only), high levels of depression and anxiety (combined), or low levels of both (control) completed an emotion-word Stroop task during event-related brain potential recording. Pleasant and unpleasant words were matched on emotional arousal level. An attentional bias was not evident in the depression-only group. Women in the combined group had larger N200 amplitude for pleasant than unpleasant stimuli, and the combined group as a whole had larger right-lateralized P300 amplitude for pleasant than unpleasant stimuli, consistent with an early and later attentional bias that is specific to unpleasant valence in the combined group. Men in the control group had larger N200 amplitude for pleasant than unpleasant stimuli, consistent with an early attentional bias that is specific to pleasant valence. The present study indicates that the nature and time course of attention prompted by emotional valence and not arousal differentiates depression with and without anxiety, with some evidence of gender moderating early effects. Overall, results suggest that co-occurring anxiety is more important than previously acknowledged in demonstrating evidence of attentional biases in depression.

Repetition of letter strings leads to activation of and connectivity with word-related regions

Individuals learn to read by gradually recognizing repeated letter combinations. However, it is unclear how or when neural mechanisms associated with repetition of basic stimuli (i.e., strings of letters) shift to involvement of higher-order language networks. The present study investigated this question by repeatedly presenting unfamiliar letter strings in a one-back matching task during an hour-long period. Activation patterns indicated that only brain areas associated with visual processing were activated during the early period, but additional regions that are usually associated with semantic and phonological processing in inferior frontal gyrus were recruited after stimuli became more familiar. Changes in activation were also observed in bilateral superior temporal cortex, also suggestive of a shift toward a more language-based processing strategy. Connectivity analyses reveal two distinct networks that correspond to phonological and visual processing, which may reflect the indirect and direct routes of reading. The phonological route maintained a similar degree of connectivity throughout the experiment, whereas visual areas increased connectivity with language areas as stimuli became more familiar, suggesting early recruitment of the direct route. This study provides insight about plasticity of the brain as individuals become familiar with unfamiliar combinations of letters (i.e., words in a new language, new acronyms) and has implications for engaging these linguistic networks during development of language remediation therapies.