Cognitive Bias by Gender Interaction on N170 Response to Emotional Facial Expressions in Major and Minor Depression

Abstract

States of depression are considered to relate to a cognitive bias reactivity to emotional events. Moreover, gender effect may influence differences in emotional processing. The current study is to investigate whether there is an interaction of cognitive bias by gender on emotional processing in minor depression (MiD) and major depression (MaD). N170 component was obtained during a visual emotional oddball paradigm to manipulate the processing of emotional information in 33 MiD, 36 MaD, and 32 controls (CN). Compared with CN, in male, both MiD and MaD had lower N170 amplitudes for happy faces, but MaD had higher N170 amplitudes for sad faces; in female, both MiD and MaD had lower N170 amplitudes for happy and neutral faces, but higher N170 amplitudes for sad faces. Compared with MaD in male, MiD had higher N170 amplitudes for happy faces, lower N170 amplitudes for sad faces; in female, MiD only had higher N170 amplitudes for sad faces. Interestingly, a negative relationship was observed between N170 amplitude and the HDRS score for identification of happy faces in depressed patients while N170 amplitude was positively correlated with the HDRS score for sad faces identification. These results provide novel evidence for the mood-brightening effect with an interaction of cognitive bias by gender on emotional processing. It further suggests that female depression may be more vulnerable than male during emotional face processing with the unconscious negative cognitive bias and depressive syndromes may exist on a spectrum of severity on emotional face processing.

Comparison of Ecological Micro-Expression Recognition in Patients with Depression and Healthy Individuals

“…In addition, a review (Bourke et al, 2010 ) revealed that compared with healthy individuals, patients with depression allocate more (less) attention resources to sad (pleasant) facial expressions, while processing ordinary facial expressions, but numerous studies have shown that the ACC of recognizing ordinary facial expressions showed no significant difference between these two groups, which supports the results of the present study to some extent. In terms of RT, the patients’ RT was longer than that of healthy individuals, which was consistent with the results of patients processing ordinary facial expressions (Wu et al, 2016 ; Zhang et al, 2016 ). However, Dai et al ( 2016 ) found that the RT of patients with depression and healthy individuals processing neutral expression showed no significant difference, while the patients’ RT of processing sad expression was shorter than that of healthy individuals.…”

Abnormal resting state activity of left middle occipital gyrus and its functional connectivity in female patients with major depressive disorder

“…Our findings were also compatible with previous study. Recently, an event-related potential study suggested that female depression may be more vulnerable that male during emotional face processing with the unconscious negative cognitive bias, and considered that unconscious cognitive bias may be modulated by sex effects [ 73 ].…”

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Improves Amygdale Functional Connectivity in Major Depressive Disorder

“…The disease severity of our subjects (mean HAMD-17 score: 26.95 for active rTMS, and 25.5 for sham rTMS) were more severe than those of their study (mean HRSD-17 score: 16 for active rTMS, and 13.1 for sham rTMS). Indeed, a series of studies have shown different emotional processing between minor depression and major depression and different mechanisms of electrophysiological damage (36).…”