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    • Given the increased vulnerability for anxiety

    2018-11-03

    Given the increased vulnerability for anxiety among individuals with BI through the moderating role of attention bias, the present study aims to examine the BI-attention-anxiety link by delineating the electrophysiological correlates of threat bias in an at-risk sample. The dot-probe task, a standard measure for capturing threat bias, has been criticized for being an indirect measure of covert orienting of attention since inferences must be made from response time performance (Brown et al., 2014). One way to obtain a more direct, physiological measure of attention is to examine event-related potentials (ERPs) during this task. The ability to capture changes in ccr2 antagonist activity within milliseconds make ERPs a powerful and sensitive candidate to study early attentional processes associated with the behaviorally observed threat bias. ERPs can therefore offer insight into primary processes involved in attention to threat and their relations to social anxiety. Early, automatic attentional processes can be captured via the P1 and N1 components. The P1 reflects allocation of attention to stimuli, is maximal in the occipital region (Mangun, 1995; Mangun and Buck, 1998), and is sensitive to face stimuli, particularly novel and emotional faces (Eimer and Holmes, 2007; Halit et al., 2000; Itier and Taylor, 2004). The N1 emerges during visual processing and reflects perceptual facilitation of attended inputs, such as target enhancement and discrimination (Luck, 2014; Mangun, 1995). There is some evidence that the N1 may be particularly sensitive to face processing (Eimer and Holmes, 2007). To date, a growing literature has used ERPs during the administration of the dot-probe task (or related variants) to track the chronometry of attention processing to threatening and nonthreatening face stimuli in adults (see Table 1). The extant findings were equivocal: two studies found greater P1 amplitude time-locked to face displays in clinically socially anxious adults (Mueller et al., 2009) or adults with reported high fear of evaluation (Rossignol et al., 2013). On the other hand, studies reported no significant modulation of the P1 in non-selected samples (Pourtois et al., 2004; Santesso et al., 2008) and participants high in self-report trait anxiety (Eldar et al., 2010). These discrepancies in findings could stem from the distinct samples being studied. Finally, one dot-probe study reported no difference in N1 amplitude between high and low trait anxious adults (Eldar et al., 2010). Higher-order and more controlled attention processes can be captured via the P2 and N2 components. The P2 component has been associated with sustained perceptual processing (Schupp et al., 2004; Schupp et al., 2003), greater mobilization of attentional resources on salient stimuli (Bar-Haim et al., 2005; Eldar et al., 2010), and the initial processing of emotion evaluation (Carretié et al., 2001; Huang and Luo, 2006). Face displays in the dot-probe task elicited higher P2 amplitudes in anxious adults or adults with high fear of negative evaluation (Eldar et al., 2010; Rossignol et al., 2013). The N2 is thought to be involved in top-down executive function, specifically to signal the need to inhibit a prepotent response to allow for the execution of subdominant behavior. The N2 component also reflects attention control (Van Veen and Carter, 2002) and conflict monitoring (Yeung and Cohen, 2006) relating to efforts at diverting attention away from threat (Dennis and Chen, 2007, 2009). An ERP study on attention training found that the N2 is augmented following training of attention away from threatening faces (Eldar and Bar-Haim, 2010). Further, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data suggest that behaviorally inhibited children (Fu et al., in press) and healthy adults who were behaviorally inhibited as children (Jarcho et al., 2013, 2014) exhibit perturbed functioning in brain regions underlying cognitive control processes. High levels of cognitive control – in the context of BI – has also been associated with increases in anxiety (Henderson et al., 2015; White et al., 2011) and is marked by an increased N2 during task performance (Lamm et al., 2014).