Just Swap Out of Negative Vibes? Rumination and Inhibition Deficits in Major Depressive Disorder: Data from Event-Related Potentials Studies

Abstract

Major depression is a serious disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Emotion hyperactivity leads to excessive negative ruminations that daily hijack the patient’s mental life, impacting their mood. Evidence from past researches suggest that depressive patients present several cognitive impairments in attention and working memory, leading to a more acute selective attention for negative stimuli and a greater accessibility of negative memories. Recently, is has been proposed that impaired inhibitory functioning with regard to emotional information processing might be one of the mechanisms of ruminations linking memory, attention and depression. It seems that inhibition deficit is present at both the input level (i.e., the ability to reduce the interference from emotional distracters) and the higher level (i.e., the ability to direct the attention away from emotional material that has already been processed) of emotional information processing. Event-related potentials (ERP) have widely been used to study inhibition in adults suffering from various psychopathological states. In particular, depressive disorder has been linked to ERPs modulations, at early as well as at latter stages of the information-processing stream, when processing affective material. For instance, deficits in inhibiting negative information have been indexed by changes in the parameters (amplitudes and latencies) of early P2, P1 and N1 components while other ERP studies have shown an ability to differentiate depressed patients from normal controls based upon response inhibition difficulties in go-nogo tasks, indexed by later NoGo P3 differences. In this review, we will focus on results of ERP studies investigating inhibition and its interaction with emotional related cue processing in depressive populations. Implications for future research and theoretical perspectives will be discussed within the framework of current models of depressive disorder, based upon the hypothesis that negative ruminations are at the center of depression processes.

The superior longitudinal fasciculus and its functional triple-network mechanisms in brooding

“…Efforts to identify a straightforward role for ACC structure in brooding have been somewhat inconsistent, however (Nejad et al, 2013; Kühn et al, 2012; Cooney et al, 2010), perhaps alluding to its dense interconnectivity with other cortical areas (Etkin et al, 2011) or the multiple specialized functions among ACC sub-regions (Stevens et al, 2011). Ultimately, appeals made to grey-matter alone have become increasingly problematic in the study of brooding because they do not reflect a commensurate level of information complexity to its functional connectivity biomarkers that verifiably exhibit distributed and dynamical neural activity (Mazzocchi, 2012; Monnart et al, 2016).…”

A Reproducible Neurobiology of Depressive Rumination

“…Although older studies of modular biomarkers have identified a core set of nodes relevant to each of these mechanisms, the modular perspective cannot account for dynamic interactions across those nodes (Monnart et al, 2016). More recent unimodal connectivity research has also failed to address whether the tentative set of functional and structural connectivity biomarkers of DR already identified represent independent or interdependent (Menon et al, 2011) brain systems.…”

Special Report on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Clinical EEG and Research and Consensus Recommendations for the Safe Use of EEG

“…22 In this view, by allowing the evaluation of the entire information processing stream, ERPs can help pinpoint the specific neurocognitive functions that should be targeted in each patient through specific and individualized cognitive remediation procedures (through cognitive training and NIBS tools, for instance 22 ). Moreover, because cognitive symptoms are closely linked to the onset and maintenance of clinical symptoms (eg, a lack of inhibition can support negative intrusive thoughts or ruminations in depressive disorders as well as relapse in alcohol dependence 23,77 ), ERPs can also be used as biological markers of the progression of a brain-based disease. 66 Accordingly, the oddball P300 and the No-Go P300 components (ERP waveforms typically elicited in classical paradigms such as the oddball and the Go/No-Go tasks) have been recently shown to predict abstinence vs. relapse at three months in recently detoxified alcoholic patients, 25 while MMN deficits have been shown to differ between early and chronic schizophrenia.…”