Biased processing of sad faces: An ERP marker candidate for depression susceptibility

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex reduced attentional bias toward natural emotional sounds

Previous research has indicated that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) exerts an influence on attentional bias toward visual emotional information. However, it remains unclear whether the left DLPFC also play an important role in attentional bias toward natural emotional sounds. The current research employed the emotional spatial cueing paradigm, incorporating natural emotional sounds of considerable ecological validity as auditory cues. Additionally, high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) was utilized to examine the impact of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) on attentional bias and its subcomponents, namely attentional engagement and attentional disengagement. The results showed that (1) compared to sham condition, anodal HD-tDCS over the left DLPFC reduced the attentional bias toward positive and negative sounds; (2) anodal HD-tDCS over the left DLPFC reduced the attentional engagement toward positive and negative sounds, whereas it did not affect attentional disengagement away from natural emotional sounds. Taken together, the present study has shown that left DLPFC, which was closely related with the top-down attention regulatory function, plays an important role in auditory emotional attentional bias.

A sleepless night disrupts the resolution of emotional conflicts: Behavioural and neural evidence

The present study aims to investigate the influence of 24-hr sleep deprivation on implicit emotion regulation using the emotional conflict task. Twenty-five healthy young adults completed a repeated-measures study protocol involving a night of at-home normal sleep control and a night of in-laboratory sleep deprivation. Prior to the experimental session, all participants wore an actigraph watch and completed the sleep diary. Following each condition, participants performed an emotional conflict task with electroencephalographic recordings. Emotional faces (fearful or happy) overlaid with words ("fear" or "happy") were used as stimuli creating congruent or incongruent trials, and participants were instructed to indicate whether the facial expression was happy or fearful. We measured the accuracy and reaction time on the emotional conflict task, as well as the mean amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related potential at CPz. At the behavioural level, sleep-deprived participants showed reduced alertness with overall longer reaction times and higher error rates. In addition, participants in the sleep deprivation condition made more errors when the current trial followed congruent trials compared with when it followed incongruent trials. At the neural level, P300 amplitude evoked under the sleep-deprived condition was significantly more positive compared with the normal sleep condition, and this effect interacted with previous-trial and current-trial congruency conditions, suggesting that participants used more attentional resources to resolve emotional conflicts when sleep deprived. Our study provided pioneering data demonstrating that sleep deprivation may impair the regulation of emotional processing in the absence of explicit instruction among emerging adults.

Altered beta band spatial-temporal interactions during negative emotional processing in major depressive disorder: An MEG study

BACKGROUND

The mood-concordance bias is a key feature of major depressive disorder (MDD), but the spatiotemporal neural activity associated with emotional processing in MDD remains unclear. Understanding the dysregulated connectivity patterns during emotional processing and their relationship with clinical symptoms could provide insights into MDD neuropathology.

METHODS

We enrolled 108 MDD patients and 64 healthy controls (HCs) who performed an emotion recognition task during magnetoencephalography recording. Network-based statistics (NBS) was used to analyze whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) across different frequency ranges during distinct temporal periods. The relationship between the aberrant FC and affective symptoms was explored.

RESULTS

MDD patients exhibited decreased FC strength in the beta band (13-30 Hz) compared to HCs. During the early stage of emotional processing (0-100 ms), reduced FC was observed between the left parahippocampal gyrus and the left cuneus. In the late stage (250-400 ms), aberrant FC was primarily found in the cortex-limbic-striatum systems. Moreover, the FC strength between the right fusiform gyrus and left thalamus, and between the left calcarine fissure and left inferior temporal gyrus were negatively associated with Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) scores.

LIMITATIONS

Medication information was not involved.

CONCLUSION

MDD patients exhibited abnormal temporal-spatial neural interactions in the beta band, ranging from early sensory to later cognitive processing stages. These aberrant interactions involve the cortex-limbic-striatum circuit. Notably, aberrant FC in may serve as a potential biomarker for assessing depression severity.

Processing emotions from faces and words measured by event-related brain potentials

Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, and surprise - relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words. Confirming previous findings, facial fear elicited an early and strong posterior negativity. Instead of expected parietal positivity, both the happy faces and words produced significantly more negative responses compared to neutral. Surprise in facial expressions and words elicited a strong early response in the left temporal cortex, which could be a signature of appraisal. The results of this study are consistent with the view that both types of affective stimuli, facial emotions and word meaning, set off rapid processing and responses occur very early in the processing stage.

Rethinking the risk for depression using the RDoC: A psychophysiological perspective

Considering that the classical categorical approach to mental disorders does not allow a clear identification of at-risk conditions, the dimensional approach provided by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is useful in the exploration of vulnerability to psychopathology. In the RDoC era, psychophysiological models have an important role in the reconceptualization of mental disorders. Indeed, progress in the study of depression vulnerability has increasingly been informed by psychophysiological models. By adopting an RDoC lens, this narrative review focuses on how psychophysiological models can be used to advance our knowledge of the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying depression vulnerability. Findings from psychophysiological research that explored multiple RDoC domains in populations at-risk for depression are reviewed and discussed. Future directions for the application of psychophysiological research in reaching a more complete understanding of depression vulnerability and, ultimately, improving clinical utility, are presented.

The Neural Correlates of the Recognition of Emotional Intensity Deficits in Major Depression: An ERP Study

PURPOSE

Deficits in facial emotional intensity recognition have been associated with social cognition in patients with major depression. The study examined multiple event-related potential (ERP) components in patients with major depression and investigated the relationships between ERPs, social cognition, and clinical features.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS

Thirty-one patients met DSM-IV diagnosis of depression and 31 healthy participants completed the emotion intensity recognition task (EIRT), while ERPs were recorded. Data on ERP components (P100, N170, P200, and P300) were analyzed.

RESULTS

The behavioral results showed that patients with major depression performed worse on EIRT, including all six categories of emotions (sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, anger, and fear), compared to healthy participants. The ERP results showed that patients with major depression exhibited higher P100 amplitudes for sad and happy faces than healthy participants; P300 amplitudes induced by sad and surprise faces were also higher than in healthy participants, mainly in the central and temporal lobes. A positive correlation was found between sadness intensity scores and P100 amplitudes in patients with major depression.

CONCLUSION

Patients with major depression are biased in their identification of facial expressions indicating emotional intensity. Specifically, they have emotional biases in the early and late stages of cognitive processing, mainly in the form of sensitivity to sad stimuli. It may lead to a persistent rumination of sadness that is detrimental to the remission of depression. Additionally, patients with major depression devote different amounts of cognitive resources for different intensities of sad faces during the preconscious stage of cognitive processing. The more intense their perception of sadness, the more cognitive resources they devote. Therefore, the assessment of the intensity of facial expressions is an important research topic, with clinical implications on social cognitive function in patients with major depression.

Auditory and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli (Experiment 1) or visual stimuli (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias (Experiment 1) and cross-modal attentional bias (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3) toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds.

Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Covert vs. Overt Emotional Face Processing in Dysphoria

People at risk of developing clinical depression exhibit attentional biases for emotional faces. To clarify whether such effects occur at an early, automatic, or at a late, deliberate processing stage of emotional processing, the present study used high-density electroencephalography during both covert and overt processing of sad, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions in healthy participants with high dysphoria (n = 16) and with low dysphoria (n = 19). A state-of-the-art non-parametric permutation-based statistical approach was then used to explore the effects of emotion, attentional task demands, and group. Behaviorally, participants responded faster and more accurately when overtly categorizing happy faces and they were slower and less accurate when categorizing sad and fearful faces, independent of the dysphoria group. Electrophysiologically, in an early time-window (N170: 140-180 ms), there was a significant main effect for the dysphoria group, with greater negative voltage for the high vs. low dysphoria group over the left-sided temporo-occipital scalp. Furthermore, there was a significant group by emotional interaction, with the high dysphoria group displaying greater negative amplitude N170 for happy than fearful faces. Attentional task demands did not influence such early effects. In contrast, in an intermediate time-window (EPN: 200-400 ms) and in a late time-window (LPP: 500-750 ms) there were no significant main effects nor interactions involving the dysphoria Group. The LPP results paralleled the behavioral results, with greater LPP voltages for sad and fearful relative to happy faces only in the overt task, but similarly so in the two dysphoria groups. This study provides novel evidence that alterations in face processing in dysphoric individuals can be seen at the early stages of face perception, as indexed by the N170, although not in the form of a typical pattern of mood-congruent attentional bias. In contrast, intermediate (EPN) and late (LPP) stages of emotional face processing appear unaffected by dysphoria. Importantly, the early dysphoria effect appears to be independent of the top-down allocation of attention, further supporting the idea that dysphoria may influence a stage of automatic emotional appraisal. It is proposed that it may be a consequence of a shift from holistic to feature-based processing of facial expressions, or may be due to the influence of negative schemas acting as a negative context for emotional facial processing.

The effect of an induced negative mood on the updating of affective information

Updating is an important executive function that is vital for the attainment of goals such as cognitive tasks, daily activities, and the regulation of emotion. The ability to update affective content in working memory is said to be influenced by mood. However, little is known regarding the influences of mood on the valence of affective content. We hypothesized that first, a negative mood would impair the updating of affective information. Second, this impeding impact would be weaker for the updating of negative information due to the mood congruence effect. Sixty-three Russian-speaking participants were recruited for the experiment. Half of the participants were induced into a negative mood by negative pictures; the other half were presented with neutral pictures. All participants performed the affective 2-back task before and after mood induction. The results showed that negative mood impaired the accuracy rates of updating. However, the mood congruence effect was not observed in the updating of positive and negative materials. We recommend that more experiments be conducted with varied affective stimuli.

Emotional Modulation of Frontal Alpha Asymmetry - a Novel Biomarker of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Objective findings of brain injury or dysfunction are typically lacking in mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) despite prolonged post-concussion symptoms in some patients. Thus, there is a need for objective biomarkers of MTBI that reflect altered brain physiology underlying subjective symptoms. We have previously reported increased attention to threat-related stimuli in subjects with MTBI, suggesting a physiological vulnerability to depression. Vulnerability to depression has been linked with relatively greater activity of the right than left frontal cortex reflected in inverse pattern in frontal alpha with greater power on the left than right. We investigated whether patients with previous MTBI show this pattern of frontal activity reflected in more negative frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) scores. Furthermore, in search for potential biomarkers of MTBI, we created a novel index, emotional modulation of FAA (eFAA) and investigated whether it correlates with subjective symptoms. EEG was recorded while subjects with previous MTBI and controls performed a computer-based reaction time task integrating different cognitive executive functions and containing either threat-related or emotionally neutral visual stimuli. Post-concussion symptoms and depression were assessed using the Rivermead Post-Concussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPQ) and Beck's depression inventory (BDI). Task-induced FAA was assessed and eFAA calculated by subtracting FAA in the context of neutral stimuli from FAA in the context of emotional stimuli. The MTBI group showed FAA scores reflecting relatively greater right-sided frontal activity compared to healthy controls. eFAA differentiated the symptomatic MTBI from non-symptomatic MTBI group and from healthy controls. eFAA also correlated with RPQ and BDI scores. In conclusion, FAA pattern previously linked with vulnerability to depression, was observed in patients with previous MTBI. Furthermore, eFAA has potential as a biomarker of altered affective brain functions in MTBI.

Sad expressions during encoding enhance facial identity recognition in visual working memory in depression: Behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

BACKGROUND

Mood-congruent memory biases are prominently featured in cognitive theories of depression. However, how sad expressions during encoding affect facial identity recognition in visual working memory (WM) and the electrophysiological correlates in depressed individuals are unclear.

METHODS

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 30 depressed participants and 31 controls during a delayed face discrimination task.

RESULTS

The depressed participants showed lower discrimination power in facial identity recognition than the controls. However, the depressed participants showed higher discrimination power in facial identity recognition for neutral probe faces preceded by sad expressions than for those preceded by happy expressions, while the controls showed no difference. Furthermore, hits (correctly recognizing studied faces) and associated vertex positive potential (VPP), P3b, and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes were significantly higher for probe faces preceded by sad expressions than for those preceded by happy expressions in the depressed individuals, whereas the controls showed no differences. No such effects were found for correct rejections (correctly rejecting unstudied faces).

LIMITATIONS

The present study is limited due to the relatively small sample size and homogenous university population.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that for depressed individuals, sad expressions during encoding enhanced discrimination power in facial identity recognition, especially correct recognition of studied faces in visual WM, which was associated with an increase in early structural encoding and more late attentional and perceptual resources following facial identity during retrieval, reflecting a mood-congruent memory bias.

Here's looking at you, kid? Maternal depression and adolescent attention to self- or other-directed emotional faces

BACKGROUND

Maternal depression history represents a significant risk factor for developing psychopathology in children, altered emotional responding may represent a central risk pathway. However, additional research is needed on factors that affect the strength or direction of response alterations in relation to depression-risk in youth. In particular, facial orientation and gaze direction may alter personal relevance, with emotions directed towards an individual heightening motivational salience, compared to emotions directed away.

METHODS

Mother-daughter dyads (N = 56) were recruited based on presence or absence of maternal depression history and absence of youth depression. In line with theoretical perspectives suggesting diminished sensitivity to emotional context in relation to depression risk, we examined three Event-Related Potential (ERP) components in relation to forward versus averted emotional faces in a sample of girls with and without a maternal history of depression: the N200, N400, and Late Positive Potential (LPP).

RESULTS

Results showed a significant maternal depression history by face-orientation effect. Low-risk girls exhibited more negative N200 and N400 amplitudes for straight (M = -3.72, SE = 0.83; M = -3.57, SE = 0.86) versus averted (M = -2.15, SE = 0.76; M = -1.68, SE = 0.81) faces, while girls of mothers with histories of depression showed undifferentiated N200 or N400 responses in relation to face orientation. For LPP amplitudes, low-risk girls exhibited significantly more positive LPP amplitudes than high-risk girls, but only for averted faces (M = 0.69, SE = 0.59 and M = -2.63, SE = 0.74, respectively).

LIMITATIONS

Cross-sectional design and limited sample.

CONCLUSIONS

Results indicate that familial depression risk is associated with altered responsivity to face-orientation, these were interpreted as representing differential sensitivity to the personal-relevance of emotional stimuli.

The neuroscience of sadness: A multidisciplinary synthesis and collaborative review

Sadness is typically characterized by raised inner eyebrows, lowered corners of the mouth, reduced walking speed, and slumped posture. Ancient subcortical circuitry provides a neuroanatomical foundation, extending from dorsal periaqueductal grey to subgenual anterior cingulate, the latter of which is now a treatment target in disorders of sadness. Electrophysiological studies further emphasize a role for reduced left relative to right frontal asymmetry in sadness, underpinning interest in the transcranial stimulation of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as an antidepressant target. Neuroimaging studies - including meta-analyses - indicate that sadness is associated with reduced cortical activation, which may contribute to reduced parasympathetic inhibitory control over medullary cardioacceleratory circuits. Reduced cardiac control may - in part - contribute to epidemiological reports of reduced life expectancy in affective disorders, effects equivalent to heavy smoking. We suggest that the field may be moving toward a theoretical consensus, in which different models relating to basic emotion theory and psychological constructionism may be considered as complementary, working at different levels of the phylogenetic hierarchy.

Sad expressions during encoding attenuate recognition of facial identity in visual working memory: behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

The current study investigated how sad expressions during encoding affected recognition of facial identity in visual working memory (WM) and its electrophysiological correlates. Event-related potentials were obtained from 36 individuals during a delayed face discrimination task. The hit (correctly recognising studied faces) rates, correct rejection (CR: correctly rejecting unstudied faces) rates, sensitivity d' (discrimination power of face identity recognition), and N170 (150-200 ms), the vertex positive potential (VPP; 150-200 ms), N250 (250-300 ms), P3b (350-450 ms), and late positive potential (LPP; 550-800 ms) amplitudes elicited by the neutral probe faces (previously encoded with sad and happy expressions) during hits and CR conditions were analysed. The participants showed lower hits and CRs and therefore had a lower discrimination power for facial identity preceded by sad expressions compared to happy expressions. For hits, neutral probe faces previously encoded with sad expressions exhibited increased N170, VPP, N250, P3b and LPP amplitudes compared to amplitudes following encoding with happy expressions. For correct rejections, the ERP effect of sad/happy expressions was absent. These results indicate that sad expressions during encoding attenuated the recognition of facial identity in visual WM. The reduced facial identity recognition for previously encoded sad expressions may be associated with increased early structural encoding, more late attention and perceptual resource engagement.

Attentional Avoidance of Historically Relevant, Task-Irrelevant Facial Affect: Past Depression, Interpersonal Characteristics, and Ethnicity

Experiential background can influence how individuals respond to affective interpersonal information. For formerly depressed individuals, sad facial expressions are presumably salient. If so, when performing affectively neutral daily tasks, these individuals would find peripheral sad faces particularly distracting, and thus, they might shift their attention from them. The present study examined this hypothesis by comparing how euthymic formerly depressed and never depressed adults attended to sad and happy task-irrelevant emotional facial expression stimuli. The study also measured constructs linked to interpersonal functioning and depression and conducted exploratory analyses to examine whether Hispanic ethnicity status would moderate effects of study outcomes. Results of analyses indicated that formerly depressed individuals directed more attention away from sad faces than never depressed individuals. There were no significant between-group effects for happy faces and no moderation by ethnicity on attention to affective faces. However, irrespective of depression history, Hispanic individuals reported lower fear of negative evaluation compared to non-Hispanic Caucasian individuals. Findings are in line with hypothesized attentional avoidance among formerly depressed individuals and consistent with prior research suggesting that some Hispanic individuals experience protective mental health benefits through engagement with aspects of their culture. Directions for future research are discussed.

Children's appraisals of maternal depression and responses to emotional faces in early-adolescence: An Event Related Potential (ERP) study

BACKGROUND

Parental depression represents a significant risk for depression development in offspring. While cognitive mechanisms represent a central risk pathway, children's appraisals of parental symptoms have been understudied. This study examined associations between children's self-blame, threat, and frequency/duration appraisals for maternal symptoms in relation to cognitive control and emotional response processes.

METHODS

Sixty mother-daughter (aged 10-14-years) pairs participated. Affective processing was assessed by three Event Related Potential (ERP) components, the N2, P3, and LPP, during an emotional Go/NoGo task.

RESULTS

Threat-appraisals were associated with alterations in all three ERP components, independently of maternal diagnostic histories or youth depressive symptoms. Self-blame was associated with early attentional engagement towards calm faces. Independent effects of maternal depression history and youth symptoms were also observed.

CONCLUSIONS

Results highlight the importance of youth perceptions of maternal depressive symptoms in models of depression-risk.

Depression symptomatology correlates with event-related potentials in Parkinson's disease: An affective priming study

BACKGROUND

Depression is a predominant non-motor symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD), which is often under recognised and undertreated. To improve identification of depression in PD it is imperative to examine objective brain-related markers. The present study addresses this gap by using electroencephalography (EEG) to evaluate the processing of emotionally valanced words in PD.

METHODS

Fifty non-demented PD patients, unmedicated for depression or anxiety, completed an affective priming task while EEG was simultaneously recorded. Prime and target word pairs of negative or neutral valence were presented at a short 250 ms stimulus onset asynchrony. Participants were asked to evaluate the valence of the target word by button press. Depression was measured using an established rating scale. Repeated measures analysis of covariance and correlational analyses were performed to examine whether event-related potentials (ERP) varied as a function of depression scores.

RESULTS

Key ERP findings reveal reduced responses in parietal midline P300, N400 and Late Positive Potential (LPP) difference waves between congruent and incongruent neutral targets in patients with higher depression scores.

LIMITATIONS

Comparisons of ERPs were limited by insufficient classification of participants with and without clinical depression. A majority of PD patients who had high depression scores were excluded from the analysis as they were receiving antidepressant and/or anxiolytic medications which could interfere with ERP sensitivity.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study suggests that the Pz-P300, N400 and LPP are ERP markers relates to emotional dysfunction in PD. These findings thus advance current knowledge regarding the neurophysiological markers of a common neuropsychiatric deficit in PD.

Automatic Processing of Changes in Facial Emotions in Dysphoria: A Magnetoencephalography Study

It is not known to what extent the automatic encoding and change detection of peripherally presented facial emotion is altered in dysphoria. The negative bias in automatic face processing in particular has rarely been studied. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record automatic brain responses to happy and sad faces in dysphoric (Beck's Depression Inventory ≥ 13) and control participants. Stimuli were presented in a passive oddball condition, which allowed potential negative bias in dysphoria at different stages of face processing (M100, M170, and M300) and alterations of change detection (visual mismatch negativity, vMMN) to be investigated. The magnetic counterpart of the vMMN was elicited at all stages of face processing, indexing automatic deviance detection in facial emotions. The M170 amplitude was modulated by emotion, response amplitudes being larger for sad faces than happy faces. Group differences were found for the M300, and they were indexed by two different interaction effects. At the left occipital region of interest, the dysphoric group had larger amplitudes for sad than happy deviant faces, reflecting negative bias in deviance detection, which was not found in the control group. On the other hand, the dysphoric group showed no vMMN to changes in facial emotions, while the vMMN was observed in the control group at the right occipital region of interest. Our results indicate that there is a negative bias in automatic visual deviance detection, but also a general change detection deficit in dysphoria.

Music induced happy mood suppresses the neural responses to other's pain: Evidences from an ERP study

In the current study, we explored the time course of processing other's pain under induced happy or sad moods. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded when participants observing pictures showing others in painful or non-painful situations. Mood induction procedures were applied to the participants before the picture observation task. Happy and sad moods were induced by listening to about 10 minutes of music excerpts selected from the Chinese Affective Music System (CAMS). The ERP results revealed that the induced mood can influence the early automatic components N1, P2, and N2 but not the later top-down controlled components P3 and LPP. The difference of amplitudes elicited by painful and non-painful stimuli was significantly different only in a sad mood but not in a happy mood, which indicates that comparing to a sad mood, the participants' ability to discriminate the painful stimuli from the non-painful stimuli was weakened in a happy mood. However, this reduction of sensitivity to other's pain in a happy mood does not necessarily reduce the tendency of prosocial behaviors. These findings offer psychophysiological evidences that people's moods can influence their empathic response towards other's pain.

The association between historical childhood sexual abuse and later parenting stress: a systematic review

An individual's own experiences of childhood and being parented are likely to be key determinants of their later parenting experiences. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is arguably the most toxic experience to occur in childhood and therefore may be particularly likely to impact on parenting stress in the context of parenting one's own children. This paper aims to review studies investigating associations between earlier CSA and later parenting to determine the size and consistency of the effects, identify any mediators and moderators of the relationship, and assess the quality of the evidence base. PsycINFO, Academic Search Complete, CINAHL, MEDLINE, Web of Science, PubMed and PILOTS were searched from date of inception until 4th March 2016 and 14 studies met the inclusion criteria. Seven studies indicated a degree of direct association between experiencing CSA and later parenting stress, two studies found no association and five studies suggest that other variables such as locus of control and current stressors may affect the relationship between CSA and parenting stress. Additionally, 10 studies suggest an indirect relationship between CSA and parenting stress through current level of depression. Results suggest the existence of a relationship between CSA and parenting stress though this association is mostly mediated by other variables, including depression and other stressors. Clearer definitions of CSA and use of validated questionnaires are essential to progress this field of research.

Slow identification of facial happiness in early adolescence predicts onset of depression during 8 years of follow-up

Adolescent onset depression places a high burden on those who suffer from it, and is difficult to treat. An improved understanding of mechanisms underlying susceptibility to adolescent depression may be useful in early detection and as target in treatment. Facial emotion identification bias has been suggested as trait marker for depression, but results have been inconclusive. To explore whether facial emotion identification biases may be trait markers for depression, we tested whether the speed with which young adolescents identified happy, sad, angry and fearful facial emotions predicted the onset of depression during an eight-year follow-up period. We hypothesized that facial emotion identification speed predicts depression in a symptom-congruent way and differentially predicts symptoms of anhedonia and sadness. Data were collected as part of the TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS), and involved 1840 adolescents who participated in a facial emotion identification test at age 11 and were subjected to the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) at age 19. In a multi-emotion model, slow identification of happy facial emotions tentatively predicted onset of depressive disorder within the follow-up period. Slow identification of happy emotions and fast identification of sad emotions predicted symptoms of anhedonia, but not symptoms of sadness. Our results suggest that the relative speed of identification of happiness in relation to the identification of sadness is a better predictor of depression than the identification of either facial emotion alone. A possible mechanism underlying the predictive role of facial emotion identification may be a less reactive reward system.

Updating emotional content in recovered depressed individuals: Evaluating deficits in emotion processing following a depressive episode

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Previous research has demonstrated that depressed individuals have difficulty both disengaging from negative information and maintaining positive information in working memory (WM). The present study was conducted to examine whether the tendency for depressed individuals to maintain negative content in WM and to experience difficulties maintaining positive content in WM is due to negative mood (in)congruency effects during a depressive episode, or whether these tendencies are evident outside of a depressive episode.

METHODS

Individuals who had recovered from a depressive episode and never disordered controls performed emotion 0-back and 2-back tasks designed to assess biases in updating emotional content in working memory.

RESULTS

Similar to currently depressed individuals in previous studies, recovered depressed participants disengaged from happy stimuli more quickly and from sad stimuli more slowly than did their never-depressed counterparts.

LIMITATIONS

Despite the extension of a depression-specific finding to recovered depressed individuals, the present study does not test whether the identified emotion updating biases predict long-term relapse or recovery.

CONCLUSION

The obtained results suggest that a decreased ability to disengage from negative content and to maintain positive content in WM represents a trait-like cognitive style that impairs adaptive emotion regulation and may contribute to the recurrent nature of depression.

Magnetoencephalographic Correlates of Emotional Processing in Major Depression Before and After Pharmacological Treatment

BACKGROUND

In major depressive disorder (MDD), electrophysiological and imaging studies suggest reduced neural activity in the parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions. In the present study, neural correlates of emotional processing in MDD were analyzed for the first time in a pre-/post-treatment design by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG), allowing for detecting temporal dynamics of brain activation.

METHODS

Twenty-five medication-free Caucasian in-patients with MDD and 25 matched controls underwent a baseline MEG session with passive viewing of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures. Fifteen patients were followed-up with a second MEG session after 4 weeks of antidepressant monopharmacotherapy with mirtazapine. The corresponding controls received no intervention between the measurements. The clinical course of depression was assessed using the Hamilton Depression scale.

RESULTS

Prior to treatment, an overall neocortical hypoactivation during emotional processing, particularly at the parietal regions and areas at the right temporoparietal junction, as well as abnormal valence-specific reactions at the right parietal and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) regions were observed in patients compared to controls. These effects occurred <150 ms, suggesting dysfunctional processing of emotional stimuli at a preconscious level. Successful antidepressant treatment resulted in a normalization of the hypoactivation at the right parietal and right temporoparietal regions. Accordingly, both dlPFC regions revealed an increase of activity after therapy.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study provides neurophysiological evidence for dysfunctional emotional processing in a fronto-parieto-temporal network, possibly contributing to the pathogenesis of MDD. These activation patterns might have the potential to serve as biomarkers of treatment success.

Neural correlates of attention to emotional facial expressions in dysphoria

The present study investigated whether dysphoric individuals have a difficulty in disengaging attention from negative stimuli and/or reduced attention to positive information. Sad, neutral and happy facial stimuli were presented in an attention-shifting task to 18 dysphoric and 18 control participants. Reaction times to neutral shapes (squares and diamonds) and the event-related potentials to emotional faces were recorded. Dysphoric individuals did not show impaired attentional disengagement from sad faces or facilitated disengagement from happy faces. Right occipital lateralisation of P100 was absent in dysphoric individuals, possibly indicating reduced attention-related sensory facilitation for faces. Frontal P200 was largest for sad faces among dysphoric individuals, whereas controls showed larger amplitude to both sad and happy as compared with neutral expressions, suggesting that dysphoric individuals deployed early attention to sad, but not happy, expressions. Importantly, the results were obtained controlling for the participants' trait anxiety. We conclude that at least under some circumstances the presence of depressive symptoms can modulate early, automatic stages of emotional processing.