title: Neural correlates of suspiciousness and interactions with anxiety during emotional and neutral word processing.
abstract: Suspiciousness is usually classified as a symptom of psychosis, but it also occurs in depression and anxiety disorders. Though how suspiciousness overlaps with depression is not obvious, suspiciousness does seem to overlap with anxious apprehension and anxious arousal (e.g., verbal iterative processes and vigilance about environmental threat). However, suspiciousness also has unique characteristics (e.g., concern about harm from others and vigilance about social threat). Given that both anxiety and suspiciousness have been associated with abnormalities in emotion processing, it is unclear whether it is the unique characteristics of suspiciousness or the overlap with anxiety that drive abnormalities in emotion processing. Event-related brain potentials were obtained during an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that suspiciousness interacts with anxious apprehension to modulate initial stimulus perception processes. Suspiciousness is associated with attention to all stimuli regardless of emotion content. In contrast, anxious arousal is associated with a later response to emotion stimuli only. These results suggest that suspiciousness and anxious apprehension share overlapping processes, but suspiciousness alone is associated with a hyperactive early vigilance response. Depression did not interact with suspiciousness to predict response to emotion stimuli. These findings suggest that it may be informative to assess suspiciousness in conjunction with anxiety in order to better understand how these symptoms interact and contribute to dysfunctional emotion processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Psychiatry, Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Joscelyn E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Fisher
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA ; Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Gregory A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Psychology and Counseling, University of Texas at Tyler Tyler, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Sarah M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Sass
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Rebecca Levin
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Silton
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Radiology, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: J Christopher
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Edgar
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA ; Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego San Diego, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Jennifer L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Wendy
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Heller
keywords: anxiety; emotional stroop; event-related brain potentials; paranoia; suspiciousness