Depression reduces perceptual sensitivity for positive words and pictures

Separate neural networks of implicit emotional processing between pictures and words: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of brain imaging studies

Both pictures and words are frequently employed as experimental stimuli to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms of emotional processing. However, it remains unclear whether emotional picture processing and emotional word processing share neural underpinnings. To address this issue, we focus on neuroimaging studies examining the implicit processing of affective words and pictures, which require participants to meet cognitive task demands under the implicit influence of emotional pictorial or verbal stimuli. A coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis was conducted on these studies, which revealed no common activation maximum between the picture and word conditions. Specifically, implicit negative picture processing (35 experiments, 393 foci, and 932 subjects) engages the bilateral amygdala, left hippocampus, fusiform gyri, and right insula, which are mainly located in the subcortical network and visual network associated with bottom-up emotional responses. In contrast, implicit negative word processing (34 experiments, 316 foci, and 799 subjects) engages the default mode network and fronto-parietal network including the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, indicating the involvement of top-down semantic processing and emotion regulation. Our findings indicate that affective pictures (that intrinsically have an affective valence) and affective words (that inherit the affective valence from their object) modulate implicit emotional processing in different ways, and therefore recruit distinct brain systems.

Negative Bias During Early Attentional Engagement in Major Depressive Disorder as Examined Using a Two-Stage Model: High Sensitivity to Sad but Bluntness to Happy Cues

Negative attentional bias has been well established in depression. However, there is very limited knowledge about whether this depression-relevant negative bias exits during initial attentional allocation, as compared with the converging evidence for the negative bias during sustained attention engagement. This study used both behavioral and electrophysiological measures to examine the initial attention engagement in depressed patients influenced by mood-congruent and mood-incongruent emotions. The dot-probe task was performed with a 100-ms exposure time of the emotional cues (emotional and neutral face pairs). The behavioral results showed that the patients responded faster following valid compared with invalid sad facial cues. Electrophysiological indexes in the frame of the two-stage model of attentional modulation by emotions provided cognitive mechanisms in distinct attention engagement stages: (1) the patients exhibited reduced P1 amplitudes following validly than invalidly happy cues than did the healthy controls, indicating a positive attenuation at an early stage of automatic attention orientation; and (2) the patients exhibited enhanced whereas the controls showed reduced P3 amplitudes following validly than invalidly sad cues, suggesting a mood-congruent negative potentiation in depression at the later stage of top-down voluntary control of attention. Depressed patients show a negative bias in early attentional allocation, reflected by preferred engagement with mood-congruent and diminished engagement with positive emotional cues/stimuli.

Negative affect interference and fear of happiness are independently associated with depressive symptoms

OBJECTIVES

Reward devaluation theory (RDT) posits that some depressed individuals avoid positivity due to its previous association with negative outcomes. Behavioral indicators of avoidance of reward support RDT, but self-report indicators have yet to be examined discriminantly. Two candidate self-report measures were examined in relation to depression: negative affect interference (NAI), or the experience of negative affect in response to positivity, and fear of happiness, a fear of prospective happiness.

METHOD

Participants completed measures assessing NAI, fear of happiness scale, and depression online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk at three time points (N = 375). Multilevel modeling examined the relationship between NAI, fear of happiness, and depressive symptoms longitudinally.

RESULTS

NAI and fear of happiness were both positively associated with depressive symptoms. They both uniquely predicted depressive symptoms when included within the same model.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that different conceptualizations of positivity avoidance are uniquely associated with depressive symptoms.

Understanding associations between negatively biased attention and depression and social anxiety: positively biased attention is key

Background and objectives: Although research supports the premise that depressed and socially anxious individuals direct attention preferentially toward negative emotional cues, little is known about how attention to positive emotional cues might modulate this negative attention bias risk process. The purpose of this study was to determine if associations between attention biases to sad and angry faces and depression and social anxiety symptoms, respectively, would be strongest in individuals who also show biased attention away from happy faces. Methods: Young adults (N = 151; 79% female; M = 19.63 years) completed self-report measures of depression and social anxiety symptoms and a dot probe task to assess attention biases to happy, sad, and angry facial expressions. Results: Attention bias to happy faces moderated associations between attention to negatively valenced faces and psychopathology symptoms. However, attention bias toward sad faces was positively and significantly related to depression symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces. Similarly, attention bias toward angry faces was positively and significantly associated with social anxiety symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces. Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with high levels of depression or social anxiety symptoms attend preferentially to emotional stimuli across valences.

Increased neural sensitivity to self-relevant stimuli in major depressive disorder

The current research examined how individuals with depression process emotional, self-relevant stimuli. Across two studies, individuals with depression and healthy controls read stimuli that varied in self-relevance while EEG data were recorded. We examined the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP component that captures the dynamic allocation of attention to motivationally salient stimuli. In Study 1, participants read single words in a passive-viewing task. Participants viewed negative, positive, or neutral words that were either normative or self-generated. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants with depression exhibited affective modulation of the LPP for self-generated stimuli only (both positive and negative) and not for normative stimuli; healthy controls exhibited similar affective modulation of the LPP for both self-relevant and normative stimuli. In Study 2, using a separate sample and a different task, stimuli were provided within the context of sentence stems referring to the self or other people. Participants with depression were more likely to endorse negative self-referent sentences and reject positive ones compared to healthy controls. Depressed participants also exhibited an increased LPP to negative stimuli compared to positive or neutral stimuli. Together, these two studies suggest that depression is characterized by relatively increased sensitivity to affective self-relevant stimuli, perhaps in the context of a broader reduction in emotional reactivity to stimuli that are not self-relevant. Thus, depression may be characterized by a more nuanced pattern based on the degree of stimulus self-relevance than either a global decrease or increase in reactivity to affective stimuli.

Emotional Biases and Recurrence in Major Depressive Disorder. Results of 2.5 Years Follow-Up of Drug-Free Cohort Vulnerable for Recurrence

An interesting factor explaining recurrence risk in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) may be neuropsychological functioning, i.e., processing of emotional stimuli/information. Negatively biased processing of emotional stimuli/information has been found in both acute and (inconclusively) remitted states of MDD, and may be causally related to recurrence of depression. We aimed to investigate self-referent, memory and interpretation biases in recurrently depressed patients in remission and relate these biases to recurrence. We included 69 remitted recurrent MDD-patients (rrMDD-patients), 35-65 years, with ≥2 episodes, voluntarily free of antidepressant maintenance therapy for at least 4 weeks. We tested self-referent biases with an emotional categorization task, bias in emotional memory by free recall of the emotion categorization task 15 min after completing it, and interpretation bias with a facial expression recognition task. We compared these participants with 43 never-depressed controls matched for age, sex and intelligence. We followed the rrMDD-patients for 2.5 years and assessed recurrent depressive episodes by structured interview. The rrMDD-patients showed biases toward emotionally negative stimuli, faster responses to negative self-relevant characteristics in the emotional categorization, better recognition of sad faces, worse recognition of neutral faces with more misclassifications as angry or disgusting faces and less misclassifications as neutral faces (0.001 < p < 0.05). Of these, the number of misclassifications as angry and the overall performance in the emotional memory task were significantly associated with the time to recurrence (p ≤ 0.04), independent of residual symptoms and number of previous episodes. In a support vector machine data-driven model, prediction of recurrence-status could best be achieved (relative to observed recurrence-rate) with demographic and childhood adversity parameters (accuracy 78.1%; 1-sided p = 0.002); neuropsychological tests could not improve this prediction. Our data suggests a persisting (mood-incongruent) emotional bias when patients with recurrent depression are in remission. Moreover, these persisting biases might be mechanistically important for recurrence and prevention thereof.

Task and Resting-State fMRI Reveal Altered Salience Responses to Positive Stimuli in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

Altered brain function in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) has been repeatedly demonstrated by task-based and resting-state studies, respectively. However, less is known concerning whether overlapped abnormalities in functional activities across modalities exist in MDD patients. To find out the answer, we implemented an fMRI experiment and collected both task and resting-state data from 19 MDD patients and 19 matched, healthy, controls. A distraction paradigm involving emotionally valenced pictures was applied to induce affective responses in subjects. As a result, concurrent deficits were found in arousing activation during a positive task in both the reward circuit and salience network (SN) that is composed of the dorsal part of anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and bilateral anterior insulae (AI) in only the MDD group. Subsequent amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (ALFF) and functional connectivity analyses based on resting-state data exhibited consistent alterations in the bilateral AI of MDD patients, and indicated patients' difficulties in regulating the balance between central executive network (CEN) and default mode network (DMN) due to altered connectivity among the CEN, DMN, and SN. Our findings provide new evidence demonstrating impaired salience processing and resulting alterations in responses to positive stimuli in MDD patients. Furthermore, brain abnormalities synchronized across functional states in MDD patients can be evidenced by a combination of task and resting-state fMRI analyses.

Reward devaluation: Dot-probe meta-analytic evidence of avoidance of positive information in depressed persons

Cognitive theories of depression and anxiety have traditionally emphasized the role of attentional biases in the processing of negative information. The dot-probe task has been widely used to study this phenomenon. Recent findings suggest that biased processing of positive information might also be an important aspect of developing psychopathological symptoms. However, despite some evidence suggesting persons with symptoms of depression and anxiety may avoid positive information, many dot-probe studies have produced null findings. The present review used conventional and novel meta-analytic methods to evaluate dot-probe attentional biases away from positive information and, for comparison, toward negative information, in depressed and anxious individuals. Results indicated that avoidance of positive information is a real effect exhibiting substantial evidential value among persons experiencing psychopathology, with individuals evidencing primary symptoms of depression clearly demonstrating this effect. Different theoretical explanations for these findings are evaluated, including those positing threat-processing structures, even-handedness, self-regulation, and reward devaluation, with the novel theory of reward devaluation emphasized and expanded. These novel findings and theory suggest that avoidance of prospective reward helps to explain the cause and sustainability of depressed states. Suggestions for future research and methodological advances are discussed.

Associations between childhood maltreatment and emotion processing biases in major depression: results from a dot-probe task

BACKGROUND

Childhood maltreatment is considered an important risk factor for the development of major depression. Research indicates an association between childhood adversity and altered emotion processing. Depression is characterized by mood-congruent cognitive biases, which play a crucial role in symptom persistence and recurrence. However, whether attentional biases in adult major depression are associated with experienced childhood neglect or abuse remains unclear.

METHODS

A sample of 45 patients suffering from major depression were recruited to examine correlations between maltreatment experienced during childhood and attentional biases to sad and happy facial expressions. Attention allocation was assessed using the dot-probe task and a history of childhood maltreatment was measured by means of the 25-item Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ).

RESULTS

Our results indicate an association between childhood maltreatment and sustained attention toward sad facial expressions. This relationship was not confounded by severity of symptoms, age, verbal intelligence or more recent stressful experiences.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings confirm the hypothesis that a mood-congruent bias in emotion processing observed in major depression is related to early traumatic experiences.