Citation

Kaiser RH, Andrews-Hanna JR, Spielberg JM, Warren SL, Sutton BP, Miller GA, Heller W, Banich MT. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2014; 10(5): 654-663.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado BoulderInstitute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nsu100

PMID

25062838

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that depressed individuals have difficulty directing attention away from negative distractors, a phenomenon known as affective interference. However, findings are mixed regarding the neural mechanisms and network dynamics of affective interference. The present study addressed these issues by comparing neural activation during emotion-word and color-word Stroop tasks in participants with varying levels of (primarily subclinical) depression. Depressive symptoms predicted increased activation to negative distractors in areas of dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and posterior cingulate (PCC) cortex, regions implicated in cognitive control and internally-directed attention, respectively. Increased dACC activity was also observed in the group-average response to incongruent distractors, suggesting that dACC activity during affective interference is related to overtaxed cognitive control. In contrast, regions of PCC were deactivated across the group in response to incongruent distractors, suggesting that PCC activity during affective interference represents task-independent processing. A psychophysiological interaction emerged in which higher depression predicted more positively correlated activity between dACC and PCC during affective interference, i.e., greater connectivity between cognitive control and internal-attention systems. These findings suggest that, when individuals high in depression are confronted by negative material, increased attention to internal thoughts and difficulty shifting resources to the external world interfere with goal-directed behavior.

Language: en