The effects of glucocorticoids on the inhibition of emotional information: A dose-response study

There is evidence that cortisol influences cognitive and affective processes such as selective attention and memory for emotional events, yet the effects of glucocorticoids on attentional inhibition in humans remain unknown. Consequently, this double-blind study examined dose-dependent effects of exogenous glucocorticoids on the inhibition of emotional information. Sixty-three university students (14 male, 49 female) ingested either a placebo pill or hydrocortisone (10 mg or 40 mg), and completed a negative priming task assessing the inhibition of pictures depicting angry, sad, and happy faces. The 10 mg, but not the 40 mg hydrocortisone dose elicited increased inhibition for angry faces relative to placebo. Thus, moderate glucocorticoid elevations may have adaptive effects on emotional information processing, whereas high glucocorticoid elevations appear to attenuate this effect, consistent with the view that there are dose-dependent effects of glucocorticoids on cognition.     

Neural basis of the emotional Stroop interference effect in major depression

BACKGROUND: A mood-congruent sensitivity towards negative stimuli has been associated with development and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD). The emotional Stroop task assesses interference effects arising from the conflict of emotional expressions consistent with disorder-specific self-schemata and cognitive colour-naming instructions. Functional neuroimaging studies of the emotional Stroop effect advocate a critical involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during these processes. METHOD: Subjects were 17 medication-free individuals with unipolar MDD in an acute depressive episode (mean age 39 years), and 17 age-, gender- and IQ-matched healthy volunteers. In an emotional Stroop task, sad and neutral words were presented in various colours, and subjects were required to name the colour of words whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Overt verbal responses were acquired with a clustered fMRI acquisition sequence. RESULTS: Individuals with depression showed greater increases in response time from neutral to sad words relative to controls. fMRI data showed a significant engagement of left rostral ACC (BA 32) and right precuneus during sad words in patients relative to controls. Additionally, rostral ACC activation was positively correlated with latencies of negative words in MDD patients. Healthy controls did not have any regions of increased activation compared to MDD patients. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide evidence for a behavioural and neural emotional Stroop effect in MDD and highlight the importance of the ACC during monitoring of conflicting cognitive processes and mood-congruent processing in depression.     

Processing of inconsistent emotional information: an fMRI study

Previous studies investigating the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) have relied on a number of tasks which involved cognitive control and attentional demands. In this fMRI study, we tested the model that ACC functions as an attentional network in the processing of language. We employed a paradigm that requires the processing of concurrent linguistic information predicting that the cognitive costs imposed by competing trials would engender the activation of ACC. Subjects were confronted with sentences where the semantic content conflicted with the prosodic intonation (CONF condition) randomly interspaced with sentences which conveyed coherent discourse components (NOCONF condition). We observed the activation of the rostral ACC and the middle frontal gyrus when the NOCONF condition was subtracted from the CONF condition. Our findings provide evidence for the involvement of the rostral ACC in the processing of complex competing linguistic stimuli, supporting theories that claim its relevance as a part of the cortical attentional circuit. The processing of emotional prosody involved a bilateral network encompassing the superior and medial temporal cortices. This evidence confirms previous research investigating the neuronal network that supports the processing of emotional information.     

The depression of spinal inhibition by morphine

Electrophoretically administered morphine and codeine, but not meperidine, blocked the inhibitory effect of glycine on spinal neurones, without reducing the effectiveness of GABA. This action of morphine was similar to, but much weaker than, that of strychnine.When administered intravenously in divided doses to circumvent marked circulatory disturbances, morphine reduced the direct and recurrent inhibition of spinal motoneurones in a parallel fashion. Again morphine was a very weak strychnine-like substance, doses in excess of 50 mg/kg being required to block these disynaptic spinal inhibitions.The results are not incompatible with the function of a glycine-like amino acid as the inhibitory transmitter for both the direct and recurrent spinal inhibitory pathway.     

Deficient intracortical inhibition in drug-naive children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is enhanced by methylphenidate

In children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), motoric hyperactivity is one of the striking abnormalities. Because this symptom might be due to an insufficient motor control, motor system excitability in 18 drug-naive ADHD-children aged 8-12 years was compared to 18 age-matched healthy children using the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Whereas motor thresholds, cortical silent period, and intracortical facilitation did not differ between the two groups, ADHD-children had significantly reduced intracortical inhibition compared to healthy controls. In all ADHD-children, a second TMS could be started after their first intake of 10 mg methylphenidate. Under this medication, a significant enhancement in intracortical inhibition could be stated. This study provides the first evidence for inhibitory deficits within the motor cortex in ADHD-children and for an enhancement of inhibitory mechanisms in this brain region by methylphenidate.     

Sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion-cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of "sad benefit", which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes.     

Selective attention for negative information and depression in schizophrenia

OBJECTIVES: Depression is a frequent feature of schizophrenia but the cognitive processes involved in its development and maintenance are unclear. Recent studies have shown that clinical depression is associated with faulty inhibitory mechanisms of selective attention for negative information. The current study examined whether patients with schizophrenia also have an attentional bias towards negative stimuli. The inhibitory processes of interference control and task-shifting abilities were also examined to assess whether patients would show a selective impairment. METHOD: Forty-three patients with schizophrenia and 24 healthy controls completed the Affective Shifting Task. RESULTS: As a group, schizophrenia patients did not show an attentional bias for negative material. However, those patients with high levels of depression demonstrated faster latencies when negative words were the targets, and higher depression scores were found to be associated with an increasing number of false alarms for negative words when they were not the targets. The results also showed that patients had impaired interference control but intact task-shifting abilities.CONCLUSIONS: Faulty inhibitory mechanisms of selective attention for negative information are not a general feature of schizophrenia but appear to be selective to those with a depressed mood. The results highlight the need for further studies examining the exact nature of the affective dysfunction in schizophrenia and the cognitive processes supporting negative emotions.     

Influence of health information levels on postpartum depression

While extensive research has been conducted on postpartum depression (PPD), the majority has been focused on psychological risk factors and treatments. There is limited research on the explicit relationship between the degree to which individuals are informed about relevant prenatal and postnatal health topics and whether this level of knowledge influences psychological outcome. This study assesses health information levels of new mothers and their influence on PPD as measured by Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) scores. Data from the 2006 Maternity Experiences Survey developed by the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System (N?=?6,421) were used. The study population included mothers ≥15 years of age at the time of the birth, who had a singleton live birth in Canada during a 3-month period preceding the 2006 Census and who lived with their infants at the time of the survey. Pre- and postnatal health information components were measured using latent variables constructed by structural equation modeling. EPDS score was added to the model, adjusting for known covariates to assess the effects of information levels on EPDS score. Pre- and postnatal health information levels are associated with decreased EPDS scores. More specifically, information on topics such as postnatal concerns and negative feelings was associated with the largest decrease in score for primiparous and multiparous women, respectively (p?<?0.0001 for both). The pre-established predictors of PPD were confirmed for both samples, with life stress associated with the largest change in EPDS score for both samples (p?<?0.0001 for both). This study demonstrates a distinct role for pre- and postnatal health information in influencing EPDS scores, supplementing previous literature. Primiparous and multiparous women benefited from different information content, with information on postnatal concerns had the largest effect on the primiparous group while information on negative feelings had the largest effect on the multiparous group. Therefore, information provision should be tailored to these two groups.     

Presynaptic inhibition compared with homosynaptic depression as an explanation for soleus H-reflex depression in humans

 Head direction (HD) and place cells were recorded in rats that had previously exhibited significant acquisition deficits on a radial arm maze task following disorientation treatment. In this study we determined whether this behavioral impairment was associated with a lack of landmark stimulus control over the preferred orientations of HD and place cells. Neurons were recorded as animals retrieved food pellets in a cylindrical apparatus containing a single cue card. Some of these HD cells were also recorded while animals explored an eight-arm radial maze in a similar cue-controlled environment. The stimulus control of the landmarks in each environment was assessed by rotating the landmark and examining the subsequent preferred orientations of HD and place cells. Animals underwent disorientation treatment before and after each recording session. Despite this disorientation, rotation of the cue card in the cylindrical apparatus resulted in a corresponding shift in the preferred orientations of HD and place cells in 13 of 15 and 7 of 7 recording sessions, respectively. On the radial arm maze, rotation of the landmark cue was associated with a corresponding shift in the HD cell’s preferred orientation in 7 of 9 sessions. These results suggest that a visual landmark’s stimulus control may not require a learned association between that landmark and an animal’s stable experience in an environment. Furthermore, instability in the HD cell system is unlikely to account for the impaired performance of the disoriented animals in the radial arm maze. Rather, these impairments may be due to the animal’s inability to utilize stable representations of the environment provided by HD and place cells. Received: 18 November 1996 / Accepted: 24 January 1997     

初一学生抑郁症状与情感虐待、自尊的关系

情感虐待是指父母或看护人等经常对孩子恐吓、侮辱、指责、轻视和孤立等,漠视孩子的情感需要。Garbarino认为情感虐待比躯体、性虐待的危害性更大,尤其是对心理精神健康的影响。而自尊作为个体总体评价及由此产生的自我体验,     

Maternal depression and cortisol in pregnancy predict offspring emotional reactivity in the preschool period

Prenatal exposures to higher levels of maternal cortisol and depression have been linked to a variety of adverse physiological, neurological, and behavioral outcomes, such as dysregulated cortisol production, structural and functional differences in limbic areas of the brain, and greater negative emotionality. This study investigated prospective associations between maternal prepartum depression/cortisol levels and offspring emotional reactivity in 163 mother–child pairs. Women were assessed repeatedly during pregnancy, and later participated in a laboratory visit with their preschool‐aged children. Mothers self‐reported on depressive symptomatology during pregnancy and provided saliva samples for cortisol assay. Offspring emotional reactivity was assessed through multiple measures, including caregiver reports, cortisol response following a stressor, and laboratory observations of behavior. The findings suggest potential prenatal timing effects, with depression and maternal cortisol measured in the first and second trimesters being more strongly associated with child emotional reactivity. Sex was found to moderate associations between maternal prepartum depression/cortisol and child emotional reactivity, with the general pattern reflecting positive associations in girls, and negative associations in boys.     

The effects of serotonin manipulations on emotional information processing and mood

BACKGROUND: Serotonin is implicated in both mood and cognition. It has recently been shown that antidepressant treatment has immediate effects on emotional information processing, which is much faster than any clinically significant effects. This review aims to investigate whether the effects on emotional information processing are reliable, and whether these effects are related to eventual clinical outcome. Treatment-efficiency may be greatly improved if early changes in emotional information processing are found to predict clinical outcome following antidepressant treatment. METHODS: Review of studies investigating the short-term effects of serotonin manipulations (including medication) on the processing of emotional information, using PubMed and PsycInfo databases. RESULTS: Twenty-five studies were identified. Serotonin manipulations were found to affect attentional bias, facial emotion recognition, emotional memory, dysfunctional attitudes and decision making. The sequential link between changes in emotional processing and mood remains to be further investigated. LIMITATIONS: The number of studies on serotonin manipulations and emotional information processing in currently depressed subjects is small. No studies yet have directly tested the link between emotional information processing and clinical outcome during the course of antidepressant treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Serotonin function is related to several aspects of emotional information processing, but it is unknown whether these changes predict or have any relationship with clinical outcome. Suggestions for future research are provided.