| Publication Abstract Display | | Type: Poster | | Title: Emotional attention processing among HIV-infected persons with Bipolar Disorder. | | Authors: Posada C, Moore DJ, Gouaux B, Letendre SL, Atkinson JH, Grant I, and the HNRP Group | | Date: 02-06-2013 | | Abstract:Objective: Studies of emotional attention have shown that persons with bipolar disorder (BD) have an attentional bias toward processing of mood-congruent information (Murphy et al, 1999) and HIV+ individuals have demonstrated attentional bias towards negatively-laden information (Novara, et al., 2000). This study examined the emotional attention abilities of participants with all possible combinations of HIV and BD with the hypothesis that the dually-affected group would demonstrate greater attentional bias than the other groups.
Participants and Methods: HIV+/BD+ (n=37), HIV+/BD- (n=16), HIV-/BD+ (n=21) and HIV-/BD- (n=15) were administered the Affective Go/No-go task (AGNT). The AGNT is a computerized task where participants press a key to respond to a target word (Go) and withhold a response to non-target words (No-go). There were three emotional conditions in this task: positive (happy), negative (sad), or neutral (neutral), and all possible combinations of the three emotional conditions were presented (e.g., Go happy, No-go sad). There was also a control condition where individuals responded to neutral words presented uppercase and lowercase font (e.g., Go UPPERCASE, No-go lowercase). Reaction Time (RT) in ms and accuracy were measured.
Results: No interactions effects were found. A main effect of HIV infection was found for RT on both conditions requiring a Go response to sad stimuli (i.e., Go sad, No-go happy; Go sad, No-go neutral) and on the Go happy, No-go sad condition (all ps < 0.05). In terms of accuracy, a main effect of HIV was found for the Go happy, No-go neutral condition only (p=0.04). For the control condition, a main effect of HIV was found for both accuracy (p=0.03) and RT (p=0.04).
Conclusions: HIV-infection seems to have a strong impact on emotional attention regardless of BD status. These results are consistent with previous findings showing that HIV-infected individuals demonstrate attentional bias toward negatively-laden information. |
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