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Cueing effect of attention among nurses with different anxiety levels: an EEG study

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Abstract

The attention to cueing among nurses with anxiety affects their nursing quality seriously. Nevertheless, the neural mechanism of attention under anxiety among nurses has not been revealed. In this study, we utilized the event-related potential (ERP) and functional brain networks to investigate the neural mechanism of the cueing attention differences between anxiety and non-anxiety nurse groups (AG-20 nurses; NAG-20 nurses) in the spatial cueing task. The results revealed that in the invalid cues (144 trials), longer reaction times, larger P2 amplitudes, and more linkages between the right frontal and parietal areas were found in AG compared to NAG. In the valid cues (288 trials), there were no significant behavioral and neural differences between the two groups. The AG in the invalid cues showed slower response times, larger P2 and N5 amplitudes, and denser linkages originating from the occipital cortex than those in the valid cues. The convolutional neural network was trained for discriminating between the anxiety nurses and the normal ones, with the average accuracy being 0.76. The findings provided a potential physiological biomarker to predict the anxiety group who need to give more psychological attention. Nurse leaders maybe get more information for offering solutions to retain mental health among nurses.

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Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#61901077), the Program for one thousand Zhongyuan Talents (204200510020), the Key Scientific Research Project of Universities in Henan Province (22A190002), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M700701).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Xinxiang Medical University, Xinxiang, Henan, China

    Yajing Si, Congcong Liu, Jiajia Zhang & Hongxing Zhang

  2. Xinxiang Municipal Key Laboratory of Psychopathology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Xinxiang, Henan, China

    Yajing Si & Hongxing Zhang

  3. School of Nursing, Xinxiang Medical University, Xinxiang, Henan, China

    Guiying Yao & Yanyan Luo

  4. School of Bioinformatics, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, China

    Peiyang Li & Yize Liu

  5. Department of Nursing, Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Xinge Wang

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  1. Yajing Si
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  2. Peiyang Li
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  3. Xinge Wang
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  4. Guiying Yao
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  8. Hongxing Zhang
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Correspondence to Hongxing Zhang or Yanyan Luo.

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Written informed consent was signed for the subject in the current study. The study was conducted according to the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institution Research Ethics Board of Xinxiang Medical University (XYLL-2020147).

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Si, Y., Li, P., Wang, X. et al. Cueing effect of attention among nurses with different anxiety levels: an EEG study. Med Biol Eng Comput 61, 2269–2279 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-023-02829-8

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