Depression and anxiety are often seen as pathological emotional states, without adaptive value. Although they may become pathological, for the normal person these emotions may be essential control processes, guides for directing thought and behavior. Understanding the distortions of judgment caused by anxiety and depression may first require understanding the adaptive process through which emotional responses to life events regulate the cognitive appraisal of those events. Emotions may influence multiple levels of neural organization, including elementary brainstem arousal mechanisms, limbic representations of threat and pleasure, and differential hemispheric contributions to cognitive representation. In the initial studies of our research project, subjects who adopted an optimistic emotional mood showed a pattern of brain electrical activity indicating a priming or facilitation of the perception of favorable outcomes as they read brief stories of daily life events. Subjects adopting a pessimistic mood showed a brain electrical pattern reflecting their expectation of unfavorable outcomes to the stories. These results suggest that a person's current mood state primes mood-congruent domains of expectation. The proposed research (1) replicates this mood induction study with improved, high-density arrays (64- and 128-channels) of scalp electrodes, (2) introduces improved signal analysis methods for assessing the time course and scalp topography of the brain electrical activity, (3) applies the new methods to examine the cognitive influences of the naturalistic mood states of subjects experiencing clinically significant depression and anxiety, and (4) extends the analysis to examine emotional influences on the process of self-evaluation.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH042129-06
Application #
2245356
Study Section
Clinical Neuroscience Review Committee (CNR)
Project Start
1989-09-01
Project End
1996-02-29
Budget Start
1994-09-30
Budget End
1996-02-29
Support Year
6
Fiscal Year
1994
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Oregon
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
948117312
City
Eugene
State
OR
Country
United States
Zip Code
97403
Waters, Allison C; Tucker, Don M (2016) Principal components of electrocortical activity during self-evaluation indicate depressive symptom severity. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 11:1335-43
Herrera, Angelica P; Meeks, Thomas W; Dawes, Sharron E et al. (2011) Emotional and cognitive health correlates of leisure activities in older Latino and Caucasian women. Psychol Health Med 16:661-74
Poulsen, Catherine; Luu, Phan; Crane, Stacey M et al. (2009) Frontolimbic activity and cognitive bias in major depression. J Abnorm Psychol 118:494-506
Tucker, Don M; Brown, Micah; Luu, Phan et al. (2007) Discharges in ventromedial frontal cortex during absence spells. Epilepsy Behav 11:546-57
Poulsen, Catherine; Luu, Phan; Davey, Colin et al. (2005) Dynamics of task sets: evidence from dense-array event-related potentials. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res 24:133-54
Luu, Phan; Tucker, Don M; Makeig, Scott (2004) Frontal midline theta and the error-related negativity: neurophysiological mechanisms of action regulation. Clin Neurophysiol 115:1821-35
Luu, Phan; Tucker, Don M; Derryberry, Douglas et al. (2003) Electrophysiological responses to errors and feedback in the process of action regulation. Psychol Sci 14:47-53
Tucker, Don M; Luu, Phan; Desmond Jr, Richard E et al. (2003) Corticolimbic mechanisms in emotional decisions. Emotion 3:127-49
Dien, Joseph; Frishkoff, Gwen A; Cerbone, Arleen et al. (2003) Parametric analysis of event-related potentials in semantic comprehension: evidence for parallel brain mechanisms. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res 15:137-53
Luu, P; Tucker, D M (2001) Regulating action: alternating activation of midline frontal and motor cortical networks. Clin Neurophysiol 112:1295-306

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