Behavioral Evidence And Neural Mechanism Of Cognitive Bias To Self-relevance In Worriers

Worry is defined as “a chain of thoughts and images,negatively affect-laden and relatively uncontrollable.During worry,people make a cognitive attempt to anticipate and prepare for possible adverse outcomes in the future.Reported proneness to worry varies continuously across the normal population.On one hand,it can work as an adaptive avoidance strategy in healthy populations.On the other hand,once it develops into a pathological response,worry can sustain and prolong negative emotions and physical arousal in anxiety.High levels of worry are characterized by selective attention to threatening cues matching emotional processing.Research has demonstrated that the subjects who worried in verbal form displayed greater attentional bias to threat than did those who worried in imagery-based form.In recent study,mentation was sampled before and after a five-minute period of worry during which participants engaged in either verbal processing of the worry topic or imagery of the worry topic.The results showed verbal worry caused a significant increase in negative intrusions.As the linguistic activity,worry is also closely associative with the impaired cognitive performance.Studies have demonstrated that different levels of worry are related to the mechanism of error commission involving stronger dorsolateral prefrontal cortex DLPFC-posterior cingulate and DLPFC-precuneus connectivity.In addition,another study found that high(but not low)worriers had less available working memory capacity when worrying in verbal compared to imagery-based worry.It indicates that the verbal nature of worry is involved in the depletion of working memory resources during worry among high-worriers.As noted earlier,research has shown that in language-production task those subjects with higher worry have larger selection costs than lower.Therefore,we think that as the linguistic-form,worry can interfere with cognitive control.The inner verbal activities during worry will play an important role as a mediator between worry and cognitive deficiency.Research has showed that negative affectivity in healthy would be associated with an increased activation of the cortical midline structures(CMS)during self-referential processing.Further,a logical extension to Mc Vay and Kane's position is that worry might entail the spontaneous generation and occupation with negative self-related thoughts.Studies on state as well as trait worry have found the involvement of neural substrates that are part of the default mode network(e.g.,CMS)and limbic system.All of these indicate that worry is closely associated with self.An unclear problem is that the relationship between worry and self-related activities,which would be investigated in the following experiments.First,the self-related processing and the relationship with the neural stimuli in different level of worriers will be explored.Second,the linguistic features in different worriers will be investigated.Behavioral and neurobiological research on attention and memory shows that people have executive control(mainly dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,DLPFC)processes directed at minimizing distraction.Recent study has found people always attempt to block out unwanted feelings and thoughts by conscious suppression and perhaps through unconscious repression.During the processes,inhibitory control mechanism(specially DLPFC)is recruited to prevent unwanted thoughts from entering awareness.Further,some studies suggest that DLPFC-mediated cognitive control functions may also pertain to emotion.With respect to the DLPFC activation,the present studies have demonstrated that,in addition to being involved in the voluntary suppression of a positive emotional reaction,the lateral portion of the DLPFC is also associated with the voluntary suppression of a negative emotion,such as sadness.In the last experiment,we showed that worriers display more self-related choices than control.However,whether the difference between worriers and control results from the deficient inhibitory control in self-related thoughts,it remains unclear.In the next study,we hypothesized that high worriers exhibit deficient capacity in inhibitory control than low worriers.Then,interactions between these regions(Perigenual anterior cingulate cortex,Rostral lateral prefrontal cortex(RLPFC)and DLPFC were examined through the psychophysiological interaction(PPI)analysis.We want to prove that neural mechanisms underlying the abnormal self-related activities in worriers derive from the reduced coupling between PACC/RLPFC and DLPFC,compared to control group.The worry group and the control group were screened.In experiment1,self-related processes and the relationship with just neutral stimuli in two groups were explored.The results in experiment 1 showed that:(1)Compared with the control,the worriers made more self-related judgments and showed delayed reaction.(2)The worriers tend to make choices of the negative relationship with the neutral stimuli.Meanwhile,they made response more automatically than the control group.In experiment 2,combining the Sentence Test,the differences between worry and control in the linguistic expressions were analyzed.It was predicted that the worriers had more self-related and negative expressions.Meanwhile,the associative ability was measured by the Remote Association Test(RAT).The results in experiment 2 demonstrated that:(3)The negative expressions in worriers were pronouncedly more than the control group.(4)Compared with the control,more self-related words were involved in worriers.(5)In addition,no significant differences were found in the RAT between worry and control,which indicated no distinction in the associative ability in those participants.In experiment1 and experiment2,the bias to self-related judgements,the negative relationship with the neutral and the more expressions of negative self in worry group reflexed negative cognitive bias towards self-related activities in worriers.It indicated that the worriers were inclined to construct the mental model of negative self.The study would be beneficial to treatment of the affective disorders in which worry is the primary characteristic.In experiment 3,worry group and control group were asked to finish the self-related judgement with just neural stimuli in the scanner.(6)In behavioral,compared with the control,the worriers made more self-related judgments.In data analysis,PACC and RLPFC are chose as the region of interest(ROI).The results of PPI analysis showed:(7)compared with the control,worriers showed reduced functional coupling between PACC\RLPFC and DLPFC.The neutral substrates may explain why high worriers showed more self-related judgement and self-related thought.To conclude,the three experiments initially indicated that worriers showed more negatively self-related processing.The linguistic feature also verified the cognition of negative self in worriers.In the neural substrates,reduced functional coupling between DLPFC and PACC\ RLPFC account for why worriers showed abnormally more self-related activities.