心境一致性认知偏向指的是抑郁病人的认知加工偏向负性情绪效价,简称认知偏向。大量行为学、电生理学以及脑戍像学的研究显示该认知偏向主要包括知觉偏向、注意偏向、记忆偏向以及解释偏向。该认知偏向以加工偏向负性、积极偏向缺失以及认知控制受损为特点,且是杏仁核等边缘系统对负性信息过度激活、纹状体对正性信息激活不足以及额区激活模式异常三个相应脑机制协同作用的产物。目前此领域存在各认知偏向之间联系不清楚、认知偏向和抑郁症的因果关系难以确定以及各研究结果不一致等有待回答的问题,这些重要问题值得引起该领域未来研究者的注意。
Mood-congruent cognitive bias ("cognitive bias" for short) is defined as a cognitive processing bias towards negative stimuli in depressed individuals. The cognitive bias mainly includes biased processing in perception, attention, memory and interpretation. We summarized the associated behavioral, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies in this field and proposed that the severe bias in depressed individuals is characterized by preferring negative stimuli and insufficient processing for positive stimuli. Accordingly, the brain mechanism shows that the limbic system (amygdala) is hyperactive in response to negative stimuli while the striatum is hypoactive in response to positive stimuli; the activation in frontal area is also abnormal. However, there are three problems unsolved in this area: (1) Data indicate that different cognitive biases are correlated with each other (Everaert, 2012), which is currently not clearly understood; (2) The causality between cognitive bias and depression is not clear; (3) Inconsistent results are often achieved in different studies, which is usually interpreted as demographic and methodological issues. We argue the discrepancy of effect sizes of experimental paradigm and the influence of self-relevance materials may also contribute to the inconsistence. Future cognitive bias studies in depression might help for solving these problems.