Abstract: Within the field of selective attention, depression has long been associated with a mood-congruent processing bias which will distribute more resources to the highlighted social stimuli such as the negative information. Some researchers proposed that the sensitivity and the involvement to the negative information are the key factors for prolonging and intensifying depression. While this bias has been documented using a number of well-established paradigms ranging from the emotional Stroop, dot probe and exogenous cueing paradigms, this area has seen somewhat inconsistent results. On the basis of the current literature, it is fair to point that the more general attentional and cognitive control deficits associated with depression in tasks not involving natural negative mood, and that might be one of the factors which affect the results for depression. Furthermore, the remained conclusions are mostly from the behavioral data and the neuroscientific work in this area is lacking. In the current study, an event-related brain potentials experiment was carried out to investigate the emotional Stroop effect for the depression-related university students under the sad mood which was elicited by the sad film editing. The results showed that the depressed participants presented consistent tendency in P1 and N1 amplitude induced by the emotional words under the neutral mood or negative mood elicited by the film editing, not showing the Stroop effect. However, the error rate of neutral word was higher under the negative mood than in neutral situation for the normal participants, with the smaller P1 and larger N1 amplitudes induced by negative emotional words under sad film editing condition than under neutral condition, suggesting that the Stroop effect was observed for the normal participants. The results suggest that, under negative state mood, the depressed individuals show attention disengagement difficulties and insufficient resources. Therefore they cannot deal with emotional conflict very well. The possible underlying mechanisms of this deficiency might be due to the limited inhibition, shifting and updating processes of control attention interferes with the negative state mood. Furthermore, the results verify the impaired disengagement hypothesis of depression, and suggest that the depressed individuals are often predicted to be excessively involved in the state of sad mood during their control attention processing. For the depressed individuals, the deficit of the attention results in the involvement of much more resources to the sad mood so as to affect their emotional regulation. The dysfunction of the emotional regulation would further negatively affect their following cognitive processing. The current work provided the psychophysiological evidence for investigating the relation between attention and emotion for depression.

Key words: negative mood, depression, emotional Stroop task, impaired disengagement hypothesis, ERPs

摘要： 运用ERPs技术探讨了正常和抑郁个体在中性和负性情境诱导下的情绪Stroop效应。结果发现正常被试在负性情境下对中性词判断的错误率比在中性情境下更高，对负性词加工的P1波幅减小、N1增大，出现了Stroop效应；抑郁被试在两种情境下对负性词加工的P1和 N1波幅没有差异。研究结果提示，抑郁个体在负性情境下出现注意脱离困难和资源不足，难以解决情绪冲突任务，支持了注意脱离损伤假说，并进一步说明抑郁个体的情绪选择性注意加工会受到心境一致性状态的影响，因过多的注意资源卷入从而出现负性情绪调节不良。实验结果为探讨抑郁个体对负性情绪的注意加工和调节过程提供了来自电生理的证据。

关键词: 负性情境, 抑郁, 情绪Stroop任务, 脱离损伤假说, ERPs