Attentional biases in anxiety and depression : behavioral and autonomic approaches ; Biais attentionnels dans l’anxiété et la dépression : approches comportementale et neurovégétative

Anxiety and depression are characterized by an altered deployment of attentional resources particularly to visual emotional information. Also, these symptomatologies manifest atypical autonomic variations in response to emotional stimuli. We therefore sought to establish links between the deployment of attention and autonomic reactivity to emotion in order to better understand the mechanisms implicated in anxiety and depression. As a result, our experimental programming implemented an integrated approach to study the deployment of attention to emotional scenes. These were presented in central vision (CV) and peripheral vision (PV) or during paradigms allowing the visualization of emotional image pairs, in individuals with pre-clinical level of anxiety and depression. We then evaluated the attentional and autonomic consequences of a modified attention deployment procedure.First, we show that anxiety is associated with hyperreactivity to emotion and hypervigilance in PV. Additionally, anxiety leads to an increased response bias for unpleasant information in PV. Also, depression is associated with reduced responsiveness to emotional information and more particularly to pleasant information. Following levels of depression, a related focalization to emotional images was observed when presented in the central vision. Secondly, we were able to establish that the autonomic reactivity to emotion can be modulated by the deployment of attention towards emotion and by depressive symptomatology. Indeed, we observe an association between autonomic reactivity and attentional bias to pleasant information on the one hand, and to depressive symptomatology on the other. Finally, a modulation of autonomic reactivity was observed following the use of an attention modification procedure. This modification is characterized by a reduction in sympathetic activity and an increase in parasympathetic activity in response to emotional stimulation.Overall, presented results provide experimental arguments in favor of the concomitant ...