Brain-Behavioral Adaptability Predicts Response to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Emotional Disorders: A Person-Centered Event-Related Potential Study

Publication date: Available online 23 June 2017 Source:Neuropsychologia Author(s): Jonathan P. Stange, Annmarie MacNamara, Amy E. Kennedy, Greg Hajcak, K. Luan Phan, Heide Klumpp Single-trial-level analyses afford the ability to link neural indices of elaborative attention (such as the late positive potential [LPP], an event-related potential) with downstream markers of attentional processing (such as reaction time [RT]). This approach can provide useful information about individual differences in information processing, such as the ability to adapt behavior based on attentional demands (“brain-behavioral adaptability”). Anxiety and depression are associated with maladaptive information processing implicating aberrant cognition-emotion interactions, but whether brain-behavioral adaptability predicts response to psychotherapy is not known. We used a novel person-centered, trial-level analysis approach to link neural indices of stimulus processing to behavioral responses and to predict treatment outcome. Thirty-nine patients with anxiety and/or depression received 12 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Prior to treatment, patients performed a speeded reaction-time task involving briefly-presented pairs of aversive and neutral pictures while electroencephalography was recorded. Multilevel modeling demonstrated that larger LPPs predicted slower responses on subsequent trials, suggesting that increased attention to the task-irrelevant nature of pictures interf...

Source: Neuropsychologia - June 23, 2017 Category: Neurology Source Type: research