Evaluation of attention bias in morphine and methamphetamine abusers towards emotional scenes during early abstinence: an eye-tracking study

Introduction: We hypothesized that inappropriate attention during the period of abstinence in individuals with substance use disorder can result in an inadequate perception of emotion and unsuitable reaction to emotional scenes. The main aim of this research was to evaluate the attentional bias towards emotional images in former substance abusers and compare it to healthy adults

Methods: Paired images of general scenes consisting of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images were presented to subjects for 3 s while their attentional bias and eye movements were measured by eye tracking. The participants were 72 male adults consisting of 23 healthy control, 24 morphine former abusers, and 25 methamphetamine former abusers. The former abusers were recruited from a private addiction quitting center and addiction rehabilitation campus. The healthy individuals were selected from general population. Number and duration of first fixation, duration of first gaze, and sustained attention towards emotional scenes were measured as the main variables and the data were analyzed using the repeated measures ANOVA

Results: A significant difference was observed between former morphine abusers and healthy control in terms of number and duration of first fixations and first gaze duration towards pleasant images

Discussion: Individuals with morphine use disorder have more problems with attending to emotional images compared to methamphetamine abusers and healthy people

Lexical access in Persian normal speakers: picture naming, verbal fluency and spontaneous speech

Lexical access is the process by which the basic conceptual, syntactical and morpho-phonological information of words are activated. Most studies of lexical access have focused on picture naming. There is hardly any previous research on other parameters of lexical access such as verbal fluency and analysis of connected speech in Persian normal participants. This study investigates the lexical access performance in normal speakers in different issues such as age, sex and education. The performance of 120 adult Persian speakers in three tasks including picture naming, verbal fluency and connected speech, was examined using "Persian Lexical Access Assessment Package". The performance of participants between two gender groups [male / female], three education groups [below 5 years / above 12 years / between 5 and 12 years] and three age groups [18 - 35 years / 36 - 55 years / 56 - 75 years] were compared. According to findings, picture naming increased with increasing education and decreased with increasing age. The performance of participants in phonological and semantic verbal fluency showed improvement with age and education. No significant difference was seen between males and females in verbal fluency task. In the analysis of connected speech there were no significant differences between different age and education groups and just mean length of utterance in males was significantly higher than females. The findings could be a primitive scale for comparison between normal subjects and patients in lexical access tasks, furthermore it could be a horizon for planning of treatment goals in patients with word finding problem according to age, gender and education

Initial orientation of attention towards emotional faces in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Early recognition of negative emotions is considered to be of vital importance. It seems that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have some difficulties recognizing facial emotional expressions, especially negative ones. This study investigated the preference of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for negative [angry, sad] facial expressions compared to normal children. Participants were 35 drug naive boys with ADHD, aged between 6-11 years, and 31 matched healthy children. Visual orientation data were recorded while participants viewed face pairs [negative-neutral pairs] shown for 3000ms. The number of first fixations made to each expression was considered as an index of initial orientation. Group comparisons revealed no difference between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder group and their matched healthy counterparts in initial orientation of attention. A tendency towards negative emotions was found within the normal group, while no difference was observed between initial allocation of attention toward negative and neutral expressions in children with ADHD. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder do not have significant preference for negative facial expressions. In contrast, normal children have a significant preference for negative facial emotions rather than neutral faces