Distinct Facial Processing Related Negative Cognitive Bias in First-Episode and Recurrent Major Depression: Evidence from the N170 ERP Component

Abstract

BackgroundStates of depression are associated with increased sensitivity to negative events. For this novel study, we have assessed the relationship between the number of depressive episodes and the dysfunctional processing of emotional facial expressions.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe used a visual emotional oddball paradigm to manipulate the processing of emotional information while event-related brain potentials were recorded in 45 patients with first episode major depression (F-MD), 40 patients with recurrent major depression (R-MD), and 46 healthy controls (HC). Compared with the HC group, F-MD patients had lower N170 amplitudes when identifying happy, neutral, and sad faces; R-MD patients had lower N170 amplitudes when identifying happy and neutral faces, but higher N170 amplitudes when identifying sad faces. F-MD patients had longer N170 latencies when identifying happy, neutral, and sad faces relative to the HC group, and R-MD patients had longer N170 latencies when identifying happy and neutral faces, but shorter N170 latencies when identifying sad faces compared with F-MD patients. Interestingly, a negative relationship was observed between N170 amplitude and the depressive severity score for identification of happy faces in R-MD patients while N170 amplitude was positively correlated with the depressive severity score for identification of sad faces in F-MD and R-MD patients. Additionally, the deficits of N170 amplitude for sad faces positively correlated with the number of depressive episodes in R-MD patients.Conclusion/SignificanceThese results provide new evidence that having more recurrent depressive episodes and serious depressive states are likely to aggravate the already abnormal processing of emotional facial expressions in patients with depression. Moreover, it further suggests that the impaired processing as indexed by N170 amplitude for positive face identification may be a potentially useful biomarker for predicting propagation of depression while N170 amplitude for negative face identification could be a potential biomarker for depression recurrence.

How Major Depressive Disorder Affects the Ability to Decode Multimodal Dynamic Emotional Stimuli

“…This result is consistent with other studies reporting a deficit in the recognition of static happy stimuli (Rubinow and Post, 1992;Surguladze et al, 2004;LeMoult et al, 2009;Csukly et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2014). Bias toward happiness may be due to anhedonia (Ribot, 1896) that is a loss of capacity to experience pleasure from activities and situations usually considered rewarding (e.g., social relations, sports, hobbies, and sexual activities).…”

“…Although many studies confirm a bias toward negative emotions, others find a deficit in the decoding of positive emotions, especially happiness (Gur et al, 1992;Rubinow and Post, 1992;Mikhailova et al, 1996;Suslow et al, 2001;Surguladze et al, 2004;Karparova et al, 2005;Joormann and Gotlib, 2006;GilboaSchechtman et al, 2008;Harmer et al, 2009;LeMoult et al, 2009;Fritzsche et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2014), and/or a global recognition deficit on both positive and negative emotions (Feinberg et al, 1986;Persad and Polivy, 1993;Asthana et al, 1998). Finally, some studies do not detect any deficit (Archer et al, 1992;Gaebel and Wölwer, 1992;Mogg et al, 2000;Weniger et al, 2004;Bediou et al, 2005;Schaefer et al, 2010), whereas others report a bias toward ambiguous and neutral faces that were mostly judged as displaying negative emotions (Hale, 1998;Bouhuys et al, 1999;Leppänen et al, 2004;Gollan et al, 2008;Douglas and Porter, 2010).…”

“…This states that it is a universal and innate human ability to recognize the facial expressions corresponding to the six emotions called basic or primary (happiness, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, and anger). The effectiveness of people with depression in decoding emotional expressions through photos was investigated with several methodologies, including the morphing task (Bediou et al, 2005;Joormann and Gotlib, 2006;Gilboa-Schechtman et al, 2008;LeMoult et al, 2009;Schaefer et al, 2010;Aldinger et al, 2013), the emotion recognition task (Kan et al, 2004;Leppänen et al, 2004;Gollan et al, 2008Gollan et al, , 2010Uekermann et al, 2008;Wright et al, 2009;Douglas and Porter, 2010;Milders et al, 2010;Naranjo et al, 2011;Punkanen et al, 2011;Péron et al, 2011;Watters and Williams, 2011;Schneider et al, 2012;Schlipf et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2014), the emotion attentional task (Gotlib et al, 2004;Joormann and Gotlib, 2007;Leyman et al, 2007;Kellough et al, 2008;Sanchez et al, 2013;Duque and Vázquez, 2014), the matching task (Milders et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2014), and the dot-probe detection task (Fritzsche et al, 2010).…”

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

“…It is wellestablished that cognitive processing can be influenced by the unconscious pessimistic or negative schemata (Nandrino et al 2004). Indeed, states of depression are related to a cognitive bias reactivity to emotional events (Chen et al 2014a), and exist a mood-brightening effect (Bylsma et al 2011).…”

“…MDD is thought to a negative cognitive bias that is specific to the processing of sad faces (Hankin et al 2010;Dai et al 2011;Mingtian et al 2011). Briefly, depressive states are classically associated with increased sensitivity to negative events (Chen et al 2014a). Converging evidences support this notion that the negative schemata affect emotional processing by increasing the salience of negative events and by reducing the salience of positive events (Gotlib and Neubauer 2000;Yoon et al 2009).…”