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Dissociated deficits in attentional networks in social anxiety and depression

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Abstract

A critical cognitive symptom that is commonly involved in social anxiety and depression is attentional deficit. However, the functional relationship between attentional deficit and these two disorders remains poorly understood. Here, we behaviorally disentangled the three key attentional components (alerting, orienting, and executive control) using the established attentional network task (ANT) to investigate how social anxiety and depression are related to deficits in these attention components. We identified a double dissociation between the symptoms of social anxiety and depression and the attentional component deficits when processing non-emotional stimuli. While individuals vulnerable to social anxiety exhibited deficits in the orienting component, individuals vulnerable to depression were impaired in the executive control component. Our findings showed that social anxiety and depression were associated with deficits in different attentional components, which are not specific to emotional information.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Haoyu Wang & Fang Fang

  2. IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Fang Fang

  3. Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Fang Fang

  4. Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Ce Mo

  5. Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 5229, Bron, 69675, France

    Ce Mo

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  1. Haoyu Wang
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Wang, H., Mo, C. & Fang, F. Dissociated deficits in attentional networks in social anxiety and depression. Sci. China Life Sci. 63, 1071–1078 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-019-1624-5

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