Effects of SSRI Antidepressants on Attentional Bias toward Emotional Scenes in First-Episode Depressive Patients: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study

Objective@#Attentional biases toward emotional scenes may represent vulnerability and maintenance factors in depression. Antidepressant therapy may improve cognitive function and reduce depression, and is considered as the mechanism of action of antidepressants. Therefore, we conducted an eye-tracking test to examine whether selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants can reduce negative attentional biases and elicit clinical responses in depression. @*Methods@#Twenty first-episode depressive patients freely viewed three types of pictures that depicted different emotional scenes (i.e., positive-control, neutral-control, and negative-control) for 4,000 ms while their eye movements were monitored. The attentional bias to different emotional scenes was assessed before and after eight weeks of SSRI treatment using the eye-tracking method. The control group included a group of healthy individuals. @*Results@#The results revealed that first-episode depressive patients oriented their gaze more frequently to negative images and less to happy images, compared to controls. Importantly, the attentional bias in depressive patients was regulated after eight weeks of SSRI treatment. Patients showed an increased tendency to fixate on positive images and a decreased tendency to focus on negative images. @*Conclusion@#This suggests that SSRI antidepressants decrease vulnerability to negative images, while having an effect on attention in respect to positive images.

The study of the effect of moral disgust in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder / 中国神经精神疾病杂志

Objective This study aims to investigate the moral disgust cognitive processing of patients with obses?sive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relationship with OCD symptoms. Methods Twenty-eight OCD and 30 healthy controls matched for gender, age and education completed lexical decision task, recording reaction time and accuracy of words and assessing the degree of disgust. Yale-Brown obsessive-compulsive scale (Y-BOCS) and Padua Invento?ry-Washington State University Revision (PI-WUSR) were used to assess the symptoms. Results OCD group showed significantly longer reaction time to core disgust-related words [(762.69 ± 128.25) ms vs. (648.69 ± 162.66) ms] and moral disgust-related words [(798.73 ± 115.26) ms vs. (727.00 ± 106.06) ms] than the healthy controls (P<0.05). OCD group showed significantly higher aversion degree to core disgust-related words [(6.38 ± 1.78) vs. (5.03 ± 1.64)] and moral dis?gust-related words [(7.08 ± 1.23) vs. (5.77 ± 1.44)] than control group (P<0.05). Y-BOCS total score, Y-BOCS obsessive thoughts score, Y-BOCS compulsive behavior score, total score of PI-WUSR, cleaning/pollution force factor score, hurt?ing themselves and others force factor were positively correlated with two types of disgust-related words in patients group (P<0.05). Multiple stepwise regression analysis between disgust words and Y-BOCS/PI-WUSR scores pointed that only CWCF influenced disgust degree of core disgust-related words (β=0.61, P<0.01) and moral disgust-related words (β=0.54, P<0.01), respectively. Conclusion The core disgust and moral disgust of OCD are stronger compared to controls.