title: Biased attention towards negative schematic expression in abstinent heroin abusers.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Drug dependents exhibit biases when evaluating emotional facial expressions; however little is known about their emotional biases appearing at the pre-awareness stage. The present study examined whether abstinent heroin abusers preferentially attended to facial expressions with particular emotion type.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-seven abstinent heroin abusers (AH participants), twenty normal healthy controls (NC participants), and nineteen individuals with moderate anxiety/depression disorders (PC participants) were included in the study. Participants searched displays containing a varying number of schematic neutral faces for a unique schematic face expressing either a positive or a negative emotion.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results revealed that AH participants had generally shallower search slopes for locating the negative target face than those for locating the positive one, whereas no such difference was found on NC participants or PC participants.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  It suggested that abstinent heroin abusers are biased to attend to negative expression more effectively than attend to positive expression. We proposed that this may result from abstinent heroin abusers' repeated exposure to people's negative expressions in their living environment or a pre-existing emotional processing deficit which could initiate the development of drug abuse behaviour.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, PR China.
authors.forename: Yanyan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Haiyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Xinyi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: Xinyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Meng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Mowei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D015982:Bias; D003863:Depression / Q000209:etiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006556:Heroin Dependence / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult