Childhood maltreatment history and attention bias variability in healthy adult women: role of inflammation and the BDNF Val66Met genotype

Childhood maltreatment has been associated with greater attention bias to emotional information, but the findings are controversial. Recently, a novel index of attention bias, i.e., attention bias variability (ABV), has been developed to better capture trauma-related attentional dysfunction. However, ABV in relation to childhood trauma has not been studied. Here, we examined the association of childhood maltreatment history with attention bias/ABV in 128 healthy adult women. Different types of childhood maltreatment were assessed with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Attention bias/ABV was measured by the dot-probe task. Possible mechanisms whereby childhood maltreatment affects attention bias/ABV were also explored, focusing on blood proinflammatory markers and the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism. We observed a significant positive correlation between childhood emotional abuse and ABV (P = 0.002). Serum high-sensitivity tumor necrosis factor-α levels were significantly positively correlated with ABV (P < 0.001), but not with childhood maltreatment. Jonckheere–Terpstra trend test showed a significant tendency toward greater ABV with increasing numbers of the BDNF Met alleles (P = 0.021). A two-way analysis of variance further revealed that the genotype-by-emotional abuse interaction for ABV was significant (P = 0.022); individuals with the Val/Met and Met/Met genotypes exhibited even greater ABV when childhood emotional abuse was present. These results indicate that childhood emotional abuse can have a long-term negative impact on emotional attention control. Increased inflammation may be involved in the mechanism of ABV, possibly independently of childhood maltreatment. The BDNF Met allele may dose-dependently increase ABV by interacting with childhood emotional abuse.

What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the construct of attention bias variability (AB-Var). However, little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of this construct, with some research suggesting that AB-Var may represent an artefact of other processes. The present study examined the underlying role of attention control and response time variability in explaining the relationship between anxiety and two commonly computed measures of AB-Var (‘moving average’ and ‘trial-level bias score’ measures). Participants (final n=195) completed measures of anxiety symptomatology, antisaccade performance (attention control), a stand-alone measure of response-time variability, and a probe task measure of attentional bias. Both measures of AB-Var were significantly associated with anxiety, response time variability, and attention control. Attention control was the single significant statistical mediator of the relationship between anxiety and the trial-level bias score measure of AB-Var. Neither response time variability nor attention control significantly mediated the relationship between anxiety and the moving average measure of AB-Var. No evidence was found for the mediating role of response time variability. The present findings suggest that the relationships observed between anxiety and the trial-level bias score measure of AB-Var in particular may be attributable to the over-arching role of attention control.