How biopsychosocial depressive risk shapes behavioral and neural responses to social evaluation in adolescence

Emotion-dependent language featuring depression

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Understanding language features of depression contributes to the detection of the disorder. Considering that depression is characterized by dysfunctions in emotion and individuals with depression often show emotion-dependent cognition, the present study investigated the speech features and word use of emotion-dependent narrations in patients with depression.

METHODS

Forty depression patients and forty controls were required to narrate self-relevant memories under five basic human emotions (i.e., sad, angry, fearful, neutral, and happy). Recorded speech and transcribed texts were analyzed.

RESULTS

Patients with depression, as compared to non-depressed individuals, talked slower and less. They also performed differently in using negative emotion, work, family, sex, biology, health, and assent words regardless of emotion manipulation. Moreover, the use of words such as first person singular pronoun, past tense, causation, achievement, family, death, psychology, impersonal pronoun, quantifier and preposition words displayed emotion-dependent differences between groups. With the involvement of emotion, linguistic indicators associated with depressive symptoms were identified and explained 71.6% variances of depression severity.

LIMITATIONS

Word use was analyzed based on the dictionary which does not cover all the words spoken in the memory task, resulting in text data loss. Besides, a relatively small number of depression patients were included in the present study and therefore the results need confirmation in future research using big emotion-dependent data of speech and texts.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that consideration of different emotional contexts is an effective means to improve the accuracy of depression detection via the analysis of word use and speech features.

Anti-saccades reveal impaired attention control over negative social evaluation in individuals with depressive symptoms

Depressed individuals are excessively sensitive to negative information but blunt to positive information, which has been considered as vulnerability to depression. Here, we focused on inhibitory control over attentional bias on social evaluation in individuals with depression. We engaged individuals with and without depressive symptoms (categorized by Beck Depression Inventory-II) in a novel attention control task using positive and negative evaluative adjectives as self-referential feedback given by social others. Participants were instructed to look at sudden onset feedback targets (pro-saccade) or the mirror location of the targets (anti-saccade) when correct saccade latencies and saccade errors were collected. The two indices showed that while both groups displayed longer latencies and more errors for anti-saccade relative to pro-saccade responses depressed individuals spent more time reacting correctly and made more errors than non-depressed individuals in the anti-saccade trials and such group differences were not observed in the pro-saccade trials. Although group differences in correct anti-saccade latencies were found for both positive and negative stimuli, depressed individuals spent more time making correct anti-saccade responses to negative social feedback than to positive ones whereas non-depressed individuals featured longer correct anti-saccade latencies for positive relative to negative evaluations. Our results suggest that depressed individuals feature an impaired ability in attention control for self-referential evaluations, notably those of negative valence, shedding new light on depression-distorted self-schema and corresponding social dysfunctions.

How biopsychosocial depressive risk shapes behavioral and neural responses to social evaluation in adolescence

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the emotional responsivity style and neurocognitive profiles of depression-related processes in at-risk youth may be helpful in revealing those most likely to develop affective disorders. However, the multiplicity of biopsychosocial risk factors makes it difficult to disentangle unique and combined effects at a neurobiological level.

METHODS

In a population-derived sample of 56 older adolescents (aged 17-20), we adopted partial least squares regression and correlation models to explore the relationships between multivariate biopsychosocial risks for later depression, emotional response style, and fMRI activity, to rejecting and inclusive social feedback.

RESULTS

Behaviorally, higher depressive risk was associated with both reduced negative affect following negative social feedback and reduced positive affect following positive social feedback. In response to both cues of rejection and inclusion, we observed a general neural pattern of increased cingulate, temporal, and striatal activity in the brain. Secondly, in response to rejection only, we observed a pattern of activity in ostensibly executive control- and emotion regulation-related brain regions encompassing fronto-parietal brain networks including the angular gyrus.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest that risk for depression is associated with a pervasive emotional insensitivity in the face of positive and negative social feedback.