title: Biased emotional attention in post-traumatic stress disorder: a help as well as a hindrance?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the emotional attentional bias in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be conceptualized either as emotional hyper-responsiveness or as reduced priming of task-relevant representations due to dysfunction in 'top-down' regulatory systems. We investigated these possibilities both with respect to threatening and positive stimuli among traumatized individuals with and without PTSD.
  
  
  METHODS
  Twenty-two patients with PTSD, 21 trauma controls and 20 non-traumatized healthy participants were evaluated on two tasks. For one of these tasks, the affective Stroop task (aST), the emotional stimuli act as distracters and interfere with task performance. For the other, the emotional lexical decision task (eLDT), emotional information facilitates task performance.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Compared to trauma controls and healthy participants, patients with PTSD showed increased interference for negative but not positive distracters on the aST and increased emotional facilitation for negative words on the eLDT.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings document that hyper-responsiveness to threat but not to positive stimuli is specific for patients with PTSD.
authors.affiliation: Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vythilingam
authors.forename: K S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Blair
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: McCaffrey
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Scaramozza
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nakic
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mondillo
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hadd
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bonne
authors.forename: D G V
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Mitchell
authors.forename: D S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Pine
authors.forename: D S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Charney
authors.forename: R J R
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Blair
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D014825:Vocabulary