Effect of Acute Antidepressant Administration on Negative Affective Bias in Depressed Patients

Harmer, Catherine J.; O'Sullivan, Ursula; Favaron, Elisa; Massey-Chase, Rachel; Ayres, Rachael; Reinecke, Andrea; Goodwin, Guy M.; Cowen, Philip J.

doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09020149

Cited by 425 publications

(428 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Behaviourally, depressed patients show increased processing of negative versus positive emotional information. These biases are apparent in a range of tasks measuring attention, perception and memory for emotional stimuli: for example, compared with healthy controls, depressed patients are slower at categorizing positive self-referent personality words, and later worse at remembering these [9] (figure 1a). By contrast, they are better at recalling negative words [12].…”

Section: Cognitive Biases In Depressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A neurocognitive model for understanding treatment action in depression

Warren

Pringle

Harmer

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Controlling brain activity to alter perception, behaviour and society'. The way in which emotion is represented and processed in the human brain is an expanding area of research and has key implications for how we understand and potentially treat affective disorders such as depression. Characterizing the effects of pharmacological manipulations of key neurotransmitter systems can also help reveal the neurochemical underpinnings of emotional processing and how common antidepressant drugs may work in the treatment of depression and anxiety. This approach has revealed that depression is associated with both neural and behavioural biases towards negative over positive stimuli. Evidence from pharmacological challenge studies suggests that antidepressant treatment acts to normalize these biases early on in treatment, resulting in patients experiencing the world in a more positive way, improving their mood over time. This model is supported by evidence from both pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions. The unique perspective on antidepressant treatment offered by this approach provides some insights into individual response to treatment, as well as novel approaches to drug development.

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Section: Cognitive Biases In Depressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A neurocognitive model for understanding treatment action in depression

Warren

Pringle

Harmer

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Furthermore, patients with MDD shown sad facial expressions exhibit increased responses in the right fusiform gyrus, left putamen and left parahippocampal gyrus compared to healthy controls (Surguladze et al, 2005). The stronger neural response to negative emotional stimuli is often interpreted as an attentional bias to negative emotional stimuli in MDD (Surguladze et al, 2005;Harmer et al 2009). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain activation predicts treatment improvement in patients with major depressive disorder

Samson

Meisenzahl

Scheuerecker

et al. 2011

Journal of Psychiatric Research

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a b s t r a c tMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with alterations in brain function that might be useful for therapy evaluation. The current study aimed to identify predictors for therapy improvement and to track functional brain changes during therapy. Twenty-one drug-free patients with MDD underwent functional MRI twice during performance of an emotional perception task: once before and once after 4 weeks of antidepressant treatment (mirtazapine or venlafaxine). Twelve healthy controls were investigated once with the same methods. A significant difference between groups was a relative greater activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in the patients vs. controls. Before treatment, patients responding better to pharmacological treatment showed greater activation in the dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (pCC) and superior frontal gyrus (SFG) when viewing of negative emotional pictures was compared with the resting condition. Activations in the caudate nucleus and insula contrasted for emotional compared to neutral stimuli were also associated with successful treatment. Responders had also significantly higher levels of activation, compared to non-responders, in a range of other brain regions. Brain activation related to treatment success might be related to altered self-referential processes and a differential response to external emotional stimuli, suggesting differences in the processing of emotionally salient stimuli between those who are likely to respond to pharmacological treatment and those who will not. The present investigation suggests the pCC, dmPFC, SFG, caudate nucleus and insula may have a key role as a biological marker for treatment response and predictor for therapeutic success.

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“…The ETB (P1vital, Oxford, UK) comprises several validated, computerized cognitive tasks designed to assess emotional processing biases and has previously been described in full [17]. In brief, the Facial Expression Recognition Task (FERT) comprises a series of facial expressions associated with six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad and surprise at a range of different intensity levels and participants are required to identify the emotion of the face.…”

Section: (D) Emotional Test Batterymentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissociable temporal effects of bupropion on behavioural measures of emotional and reward processing in depression

Walsh

Browning

Drevets

et al. 2018

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Antidepressants remediate negative biases in emotional processing early in treatment, prior to mood improvement. However, the effects on reward processing potentially relevant to the treatment of anhedonia are less clear. Here we investigate the early and sustained effects of the dopamine and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor bupropion on behavioural measures of emotional and reward processing in currently depressed individuals. Forty-six currently depressed patients and 42 healthy controls participated in a repeated measures study, during which open-label bupropion was administered to only the patient group over a six week period without a placebo group. All participants completed the Emotional Test Battery and a probabilistic instrumental learning task at week 0, week 2 and week 6. Currently depressed patients displayed negative biases in emotional processing and blunted response bias for high-probability wins compared to the healthy controls at baseline. Bupropion was found to reduce the negative biases in emotional processing early in treatment, including a significant decrease in the percentage misclassification of other face emotions as sad and the number of negative self-referent words falsely recalled between baseline and week 2. Conversely, bupropion was found to initially further reduce the response bias for high-probability wins between baseline and week 2. This effect reversed with six weeks' bupropion treatment and reward processing was normalized compared to the healthy controls. Early in treatment, bupropion acts to reduce negative biases in emotional processing but exacerbates impaired reward processing. The beneficial actions of bupropion on reward processing then occur later in treatment. Such dissociation in the temporal effects of bupropion on emotional and reward processing has implications for the treatment of the different symptom domains of negative affect and anhedonia in depression. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Of mice and mental health: facilitating dialogue between basic and clinical neuroscientists’.

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Effect of Acute Antidepressant Administration on Negative Affective Bias in Depressed Patients

Cited by 425 publications

References 30 publications

A neurocognitive model for understanding treatment action in depression

A neurocognitive model for understanding treatment action in depression

Brain activation predicts treatment improvement in patients with major depressive disorder

Dissociable temporal effects of bupropion on behavioural measures of emotional and reward processing in depression

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