Regulation of negative emotions through directed attention in high-trait-anxious women: Evidence from event-related potentials and eye-tracking.

Abnormal emotional responses in high-trait-anxious (HTA) individuals may be related to the use of emotion regulation strategies. Directed attention is a substrategy of attention deployment, which has been proven to be effective in regulating individual negative emotions. The present study investigated whether HTA women can effectively utilize directed attention to decrease negative emotions. Two studies were conducted using the same directed attention paradigm, with one focusing on event-related potentials (ERPs) and the other utilizing eye-tracking techniques. Participants viewed negative and neutral pictures and rated their negative emotions experienced during viewing. During directed attention, attention was directed towards highly arousing aspects, less arousing aspects of negative pictures, or less arousing aspects of neutral pictures. In study 1, late positive potentials (LPP) were recorded in 26 HTA and 24 low-trait-anxious (LTA) women. In study 2, the latency of first fixation, the proportion of gaze duration and fixations in the specific area were recorded in 27 HTA and 23 LTA women. Both the HTA and LTA groups revealed a decrease in negative emotional ratings and LPP amplitudes when their attention was directed towards the less arousing aspects of negative pictures. Furthermore, in this condition, the HTA group had a shorter latency of first fixation on highly arousing aspects and a higher proportion of gaze duration on less arousing aspects of negative pictures compared to the LTA group. These results indicate that when confronted with negative pictures, HTA women are able to regulate their emotional responses through directed attention, which may be accompanied by attentional vigilance and avoidance tendencies.

Open and closed microfluidics for biosensing.

Biosensing is vital for many areas like disease diagnosis, infectious disease prevention, and point-of-care monitoring. Microfluidics has been evidenced to be a powerful tool for biosensing via integrating biological detection processes into a palm-size chip. Based on the chip structure, microfluidics has two subdivision types: open microfluidics and closed microfluidics, whose operation methods would be diverse. In this review, we summarize fundamentals, liquid control methods, and applications of open and closed microfluidics separately, point out the bottlenecks, and propose potential directions of microfluidics-based biosensing.

Trait anxiety modulates the temporal dynamics of Stroop task switching: An ERP study.

The current study aimed to find neural evidence that trait anxiety interferes with one's shifting function processing efficiency. Twenty-five high trait-anxiety (HTA) and twenty-five low trait-anxiety (LTA) participants were instructed to complete a cue-based Stroop task-switching assessment of shifting function. No group difference in behavioral performance was shown, though event-related potential (ERP) results in the cue-locked period showed that only the LTA group had a general switch benefit in contingent negative variation (CNV) amplitude, indicating the LTA group exerted less task preparation effort. In the subsequent target-locked period, compared to the LTA group, the local switch cost of target-P3 was higher in the HTA group in incompatible trials, suggesting inefficient attentional resource allocation in the HTA group in incompatible trials. These ERP findings indicated that the HTA group ultimately achieved comparable behavioral performance with the LTA group at the expense of using more compensatory strategies at the neural level.