Dynamic cognitive characteristics of emotional conflict in subthreshold depressed patients: An Event-Related Potential Study

Subthreshold depression (SubD) has a considerable impact on an individual’s subjective well-being and psychosocial functioning, and is a risk factor for Major depression disorder (MDD). The inability to effectively control and resolve emotional conflict is a typical symptom of certain mood disorders, and the aim of this study was to confirm impairments in cognitive processing mechanisms for emotional conflict processing in SubD patients with event-related potential (ERP) recording. The study of the mechanisms of emotional conflict in subthreshold depression may provide an ideal model for understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms and developing preventive strategies in patients with MDD. Methods:The Healthy control (HC) and SubD groups were recruited, with 32 subjects in each group completing the word-face Stroop paradigm, during which ERP amplitudes and latencies were recorded. Results:Compared to HC group, the SubD group had lower accuracy and longer response times in both the "consistent stimulus" and "inconsistent stimulus" conditions. Regardless of the stimulus condition, the SubD group had a greater N2 amplitude in the prefrontal mid-lobe region. In the SubD group, the N450 amplitude was also found to be greater in the prefrontal middle region for the "incongruent stimulus minus congruent stimulus" and the conflict SP amplitude was smaller in the parieto-occipital region for the "incongruent stimulus minus congruent stimulus". Conclusions:The findings suggest that, supported by behavioural and brain evidence, people with SubD have dynamic cognitive deficits in emotional conflict processing, specifically greater sensitivity to early processing of emotional stimuli and sharper detection of emotional conflict, but more delayed adaptation and response options following emotional conflict resolution.

Ethnic Differences in Context: Does Emotional Conflict Mediate the Effects of Both Team- and Individual-Level Ethnic Diversity on Emotional Strain?

Work teams are becoming increasingly heterogeneous with respect to their team members’ ethnic backgrounds. Two lines of research examine ethnic diversity in work teams: The compositional approach views team-level ethnic heterogeneity as a team characteristic, and relational demography views individual-level ethnic dissimilarity as an individual member’s relation to their team. This study compares and contrasts team-level ethnic heterogeneity and individual-level ethnic dissimilarity regarding their effects on impaired well-being (i.e., emotional strain) via team- and individual-level emotional conflict. Fifty teams of retail chain salespeople (n = 602) participated in our survey at two points of measurement. Based on the ethnic background of team members, we calculated team-level ethnic heterogeneity that applied to all members, and individual-level ethnic dissimilarity within the team that varied according to each member’s ethnic background. Multilevel path modeling showed that high levels of team-level ethnic heterogeneity were related to high levels of emotional strain via team-level emotional conflict. However, the opposite was found for individual-level ethnic dissimilarity. We discussed this difference by contextualizing individual-level ethnic dissimilarity in the team-level heterogeneity and social status of ethnic groups in society at large. Our findings suggest that the social status of the ethnic group to which team members belong may impact how ethnic diversity relates to team processes and well-being.

Child abuse and automatic emotion regulation in children and adolescents

Child abuse is associated with elevated risk for psychopathology. The current study examined the role of automatic emotion regulation as a potential mechanism linking child abuse with internalizing psychopathology. A sample of 237 youth aged 8–16 years and their caregivers participated. Child abuse severity was assessed by self-report questionnaires, and automatic emotion regulation was assessed using an emotional Stroop task designed to measure adaptation to emotional conflict. A similar task without emotional stimuli was also administered to evaluate whether abuse was uniquely associated with emotion regulation, but not cognitive control applied in a nonemotional context. Internalizing psychopathology was assessed concurrently and at a 2-year longitudinal follow-up. Child abuse severity was associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation but was unrelated to cognitive control. Specifically, the severity of emotional and physical abuse, but not sexual abuse, were associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation. Emotional conflict adaptation was not associated with internalizing psychopathology prospectively. These findings suggest that childhood emotional and physical abuse, in particular, may influence automatic forms of emotion regulation. Future work exploring the socioemotional consequences of altered automatic emotion regulation among youth exposed to child abuse is clearly needed.

Long-term stability of computational parameters during approach-avoidance conflict in a transdiagnostic psychiatric patient sample

Maladaptive behavior during approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) is common to multiple psychiatric disorders. Using computational modeling, we previously reported that individuals with depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders (DEP/ANX; SUDs) exhibited differences in decision uncertainty and sensitivity to negative outcomes versus reward (emotional conflict) relative to healthy controls (HCs). However, it remains unknown whether these computational parameters and group differences are stable over time. We analyzed 1-year follow-up data from a subset of the same participants (N = 325) to assess parameter stability and relationships to other clinical and task measures. We assessed group differences in the entire sample as well as a subset matched for age and IQ across HCs (N = 48), SUDs (N = 29), and DEP/ANX (N = 121). We also assessed 2–3 week reliability in a separate sample of 30 HCs. Emotional conflict and decision uncertainty parameters showed moderate 1-year intra-class correlations (.52 and .46, respectively) and moderate to excellent correlations over the shorter period (.84 and .54, respectively). Similar to previous baseline findings, parameters correlated with multiple response time measures (ps < .001) and self-reported anxiety (r = .30, p < .001) and decision difficulty (r = .44, p < .001). Linear mixed effects analyses revealed that patients remained higher in decision uncertainty (SUDs, p = .009) and lower in emotional conflict (SUDs, p = .004, DEP/ANX, p = .02) relative to HCs. This computational modelling approach may therefore offer relatively stable markers of transdiagnostic psychopathology.

The influence of social power on neural responses to emotional conflict

Background Major power theories assume that social power can play an important role in an individual’s goal-related behaviors. However, the specific psychological mechanisms through which this occurs remain unclear. Some studies suggested that having power enhanced individuals’ goal-related behaviors, by contrast, other studies suggested that low-power individuals were associated with a greater performance in goal-directed tasks. We were particularly interested in how social power changes individuals’ goal-related behaviors during an emotional face-word Stroop task. Method Social power was primed by asking participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high-power individuals), or a situation in which they were lacking power (low-power individuals). Afterward, participants were asked to complete an emotional face-word Stroop task. In the task, words representing specific emotions were written in a prominent red color across a face, and these words and facial expressions were either congruent or incongruent. The participant’s task was to judge the emotion of the face while ignoring the red emotional words. Results Our behavioral data showed that these individuals displayed faster reaction time and better accuracy in congruent conditions, slower reaction time for fearful faces and worse accuracy for happy faces in both incongruent and congruent conditions. The event-related potential analyses showed that, compared with low-power individuals, high-power individuals showed greater P1 amplitudes when faced with emotional stimuli (both incongruent and congruent conditions), indicating that power affects individuals’ attention in the early sensory processing of emotional stimuli. For the N170 component, low-power individuals showed more negative amplitudes when facing emotional stimuli, indicated that low-power individuals paid more attention to the construct information of emotional stimuli. For the N450 component, compared with congruent conditions, incongruent conditions elicited more negative amplitudes for both high- and low-power individuals. More importantly, fearful faces provoked enhanced P1 amplitudes in incongruent conditions than in congruent conditions only for low-power individuals, while, happy faces elicited larger P1 amplitudes in congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions only for high-power individuals. The findings suggested that during the initial stage of stimuli processing low-power individuals are more sensitive to negative stimuli than high-power individuals. Conclusion These findings provided electrophysiological evidence that the differences in the emotional conflict process between high- and low-power individuals mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. Furthermore, evidence from P1 and N170 showed that there was also a redistribution of attentional resources in low-power individuals.