Emotion Regulating Attentional Control Abnormalities In Major Depressive Disorder: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

Major depressive disorders (MDD) exhibit cognitive dysfunction with respect to attention. The deficiencies in cognitive control of emotional information are associated with MDD as compared to healthy controls (HC). However, the brain mechanism underlying emotion that influences the attentional control in MDD necessitates further research. The present study explores the emotion-regulated cognitive competence in MDD at a dynamic attentional stage. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 35 clinical MDD outpatients and matched HCs by applying a modified affective priming dot-probe paradigm, which consisted of various emotional facial expression pairs. From a dynamic perspective, ERPs combined with sLORETA results showed significant differences among the groups. In compared to HC, 100 ms MDD group exhibited a greater interior-prefrontal N100, sensitive to negative-neutral faces. 200 ms MDD showed an activated parietal-occipital P200 linked to sad face, suggesting that the attentional control ability concentrated on sad mood-congruent cognition. 300 ms, a distinct P300 was observed at dorsolateral parietal cortex, representing a sustained attentional control. Our findings suggested that a negatively sad emotion influenced cognitive attentional control in MDD in the early and late attentional stages of cognition. P200 and P300 might be predictors of potential neurocognitive mechanism underlying the dysregulated attentional control of MDD.

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

“…Although recent priming studies using picture paradigms have demonstrated alterations in the P300, LPP and N400 ERP waveforms with respect to depression (in non-PD samples), the direction of the alterations were contrary to our findings. Previous literature (Cermolacce et al, 2014;Delle-Vigne et al, 2014;Hu et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018) suggests that depressed individuals show larger ERP amplitudes for negative compared to neutral targets and therefore, we expected a larger difference wave for evaluative judgements on target words when comparing negative with neutral prime or target words. Our results may suggest PD-specific emotional deficits, specifically PD-specific deficits in initiating emotional judgements in PD patients with high depression score.…”

“…Similarly, the N400 (an ERP component relevant to word processing) generated for target word stimuli was larger for negative compared to neutral primes when followed by neutral target words (Negative-Neutral prime target pair compared to Neutral-Neutral condition) in both groups, suggesting automatic processing of negative information are intact in PD patients with no affective disturbances. The present study examines how the P300 and LPP, well known ERP components associated with emotion processing (Cermolacce et al, 2014;Delle-Vigne et al, 2014;Hu et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018), as well as the N400 component related to word processing, are moderated by depressive symptoms in PD (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011).…”

“…A reduction in P300 has been demonstrated with depression using auditory oddball paradigms, suggesting deficits in evaluation, attentional allocation and short term memory encoding (Jaworska and Protzner, 2013). On the other hand, priming studies using picture (faces) paradigms have demonstrated larger P300, LPP and N400 amplitude for negative stimuli in depression (Bistricky et al, 2014;Cermolacce et al, 2014;Delle-Vigne et al, 2014;Hu et al, 2017;Li et al, 2018), suggesting difficulty in disengaging with negative information in depressed persons. Against this background, it is hypothesized that ERP components, P300, LPP and N400 will demonstrate amplitude modulations between negative and neutral target words, that the valence of the preceding prime word will also influence the ERPs generated for the target stimuli, and that depression scores modulate the ERP waveforms.…”

State and trait neural correlates of the balance between work and nonwork roles

“…Based on Kayser et al (2014) we expected target and distractor stimuli to elicit a midfrontal alpha ERS, relative to noise stimuli, between 100-150ms. As previous research suggests that attentional biases indexing the automatic orienting (Liu et al, 2015;Sass et al, 2010) or attentional avoidance (Liu et al, 2015) of threat occurs in this early window, and may be subserved at least partially by prefrontal regions (Hu et al, 2017;White et al, 2016), we hypothesised that we may see a negative relationship between alpha ERS and dissatisfaction with balance in this region. However, it was also acknowledged that a correlation may alternatively be seen in temporal regions consistent with suppression of auditory processing (Kerlin et al, 2010;Strauβ et al, 2014).…”

“…Conversely, a reduced P1 ERP has been found in individuals with high disgust sensitivity, suggesting a suppression of attention towards disgusting stimuli (Liu et al, 2015). Evidence suggests that these early modulations of attentional orienting have sources in the anterior cingulate (ACC; Santesso et al, 2008), extrastriate and temporal regions (Mueller et al, 2009), prefrontal regions (Hu et al, 2017;White et al, 2016), and the interaction of subcortical threat detection regions, such as the amygdala with visual (Pourtois et al, 2004), or prefrontal areas (White et al, 2016).…”