Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) entails a complex attentional pattern not merely restricted to happy or sad biases, but also directed towards threatening information. This study examined threat-related bias on attentional orienting when participants were not instructed about the presentation of emotional stimuli (i.e., implicit instructions). An emotional dot-probe task in which an emotional face (i.e., threat, sad, happy) is simultaneously displayed with a neutral face was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n = 26), depression (n = 24), and euthymia (n = 28) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n = 28). Symptomatic BD patients (i.e., in a manic or depressive episode) showed an attentional orienting bias toward threatening faces but not for happy or sad faces, while euthymic BD patients did not exhibit any attentional bias for emotional stimuli. A bias toward happy faces was found in the control group. Threat-related bias was not related to the severity of affective and anxiety symptoms in BD. When attention is not explicitly directed to emotional information, threat-related bias may characterize attentional orienting during mania and depression, but may be attenuated during euthymia.

双相情感障碍 (BD) 的情绪处理需要复杂的注意力模式，不仅限于快乐或悲伤的偏见，而且还指向威胁信息。当参与者没有被告知情绪刺激的呈现（即隐性指令）时，这项研究检查了与威胁相关的注意力定向偏见。一项情绪点探测任务，其中情绪面孔（即，威胁，悲伤，快乐）与中性面孔同时显示在 BD 个体的不同情节中：躁狂症（n = 26），抑郁症（n = 24） , 和 euthymia (n = 28) 以及一组健康对照 (n = 28)。有症状的 BD 患者（即，在躁狂或抑郁发作中）表现出对威胁面孔的注意力取向偏向，但对快乐或悲伤的面孔则没有，而心境正常的 BD 患者对情绪刺激没有表现出任何注意偏向。在对照组中发现了对快乐面孔的偏见。与威胁相关的偏见与 BD 中情感和焦虑症状的严重程度无关。当注意力没有明确指向情绪信息时，与威胁相关的偏见可能是躁狂和抑郁期间注意力定向的特征，但在情绪愉悦期间可能会减弱。