中国科学院心理研究所机构知识库

Objective To investigate the emotional conflict in patients with generalized anxiety disorder （GAD） and examine the effect of temporal factor. Methods Seventeen GAD patients were enrolled in the study. An affective priming paradigm was used, with positive, negative and anxiety-related words as prime stimuli, and positive or negative pictures of faces as target stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge whether the target facial expressions were positive or negative. Three SOAs （Stimulus Onset Asynchrony）, i. e, 100ms, 0ms,-100ms, were adopted to constitute the forward, simultaneous and backward priming conditions. Results When the target faces were positively valenced, both the ＂general＂ emotional conflict effect, which was the affective congruency effect not induced by anxiety-related words, and the ＂special＂ emotional conflict effect induced by the anxiety-related words, were significant when SOA= 100 ms and SOA=-100 ms. When the target faces were negatively valenced, there were significant ＂special＂ emotional conflict effects among the three SOA conditions, but no ＂general＂ emotional conflict effects in either SOA. Conclusion The pattern of the ＂special＂ emotional conflict in GAD might be due to the attentional bias and vigilance to anxiety-related information. Furthermore, our results indicated that the temporal factor exerted important effect on emotional conflict in GAD patients.

国家自然科学基金(30700234) 广东省自然科学基金(7301291) 中国博士后科学基金(20060400784)