Performance of children and adolescents with PTSD on the Stroop colour-naming task

Abstract

These findings indicate that attentional bias to trauma-congruent information is a function of PTSD in young age groups. The results are discussed with respect to the literature on information processing in PTSD.

Cognitive interference is associated with neuronal marker N-acetyl aspartate in the anterior cingulate cortex: an in vivo 1H-MRS study of the Stroop Color-Word task

“…48 Also, it is well known that processes of cognitive interference are highly abnormal in mood and anxiety disorders. [10][11][12][13][14][15] These findings, in a Molecular Psychiatry view of abnormal levels of NAA and/or glutamate (NAA is a precursor of NAAG) in these disorders, 47,48,59 are consistent with the proposed mechanism of cognitive interference where NAA (and possibly NAAG) changes in the ACC (and possibly in the DLPFC due to strong correlations between these two regions) seem to predetermine the interference level. A correspondence between regional NAA levels and the SCW interference using 1 H-MRS has not been studied in healthy subjects and in those neuropsychiatric disorders where cognitive interference is well-known to become abnormal (eg, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, mood and anxiety disorders, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and HIV).…”

“…In this study we also demonstrate a single chemical (NAA)-cognitive network in the brain, specifically in ACC, as a possible neurobiological/neurochemical mechanism for development of cognitive interference. Given that the SCW interference has been found abnormal in several neuropsychiatric disorders, [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] this neuroimaging/cognitive tool may be useful for documentation of interference in studying cognitive control mechanisms in general, and in diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders particularly where dysfunction of cingulate cortex is expected. Another valuable application of these findings might be a new drug development in the pharmaceutical industry to design new chemical compounds and drugs which would produce brain changes that would be reflected in the interference and NAA measures (eg, in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, where dysfunction of the ACC was already revealed by fMRI and the Counting Stroop; 4 or in obsessive-compulsive disorder, where reduced levels of cingulate NAA have been found using 1 H-MRS 48 ) and as an imaging tool to study effects of these chemical compounds and drugs (eg, as a guide in pre-clinical and early clinical development of drug candidates, and as proof of the effectiveness of new drugs as well as decisions on their future development).…”

“…For example, a color word such as blue that appears in an ink color such as red may inhibit naming of the color red due to automatic perception of incompatible information (such as color word blue). Previous studies of the Stroop effect provides convincing evidence that cognitive interference is abnormal in various neuropsychiatric disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 3,4 schizophrenia, 5-9 depression, 10,11 anxiety disorders, [12][13][14][15] Parkinson's disease, 16 Alzheimer's disease, 17 and HIV disease. 18 New imaging technologies, including positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have determined which functional circuitry in the brain is engaged in interference.…”

Vigilance and Avoidance of Threat in the Eye Movements of Children with Separation Anxiety Disorder

“…For example, in the emotional Stroop task people see a colored word that is sometimes threatening and sometimes non-threatening and must name its color as quickly as possible. When the word is threatening, anxious people take longer than their nonanxious counterparts to name its color, presumably because their attention is more distracted by the words' threatening meaning (e.g., in adults: Mathews and MacLeod 1985;in children: Martin et al 1992;Moradi et al 1999). Similar results have been found using the dotprobe paradigm, in which participants are shown two stimuli, one threatening and the other non-threatening, displayed on the left and right sides of a screen.…”

Interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder in children and adolescents

“…PTSD not only affects cognitive content, such as beliefs, but also cognitive processes. Studies of cognitive processes in children with PTSD arising from exposure to acute stressors have shown that they have memory deficits [42]; an attentional bias to trauma-congruent information [43]; and tend to estimate that negative events are more likely to happen to others than to themselves, suggesting a process of denial [44]. In the sinking of the Jupiter cruise ship study, children who blamed themselves by making internal attributions for negative experiences showed poorer recovery a year after the event [45].…”