Mismatch Negativity of Sad Syllables Is Absent in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

BackgroundMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is an important and highly prevalent mental disorder characterized by anhedonia and a lack of interest in everyday activities. Additionally, patients with MDD appear to have deficits in various cognitive abilities. Although a number of studies investigating the central auditory processing of low-level sound features in patients with MDD have demonstrated that this population exhibits impairments in automatic processing, the influence of emotional voice processing has yet to be addressed. To explore the automatic processing of emotional prosodies in patients with MDD, we analyzed the ability to detect automatic changes using event-related potentials (ERPs).MethodThis study included 18 patients with MDD and 22 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Subjects were instructed to watch a silent movie but to ignore the afferent acoustic emotional prosodies presented to both ears while continuous electroencephalographic activity was synchronously recorded. Prosodies included meaningless syllables, such as “dada” spoken with happy, angry, sad, or neutral tones. The mean amplitudes of the ERPs elicited by emotional stimuli and the peak latency of the emotional differential waveforms were analyzed.ResultsThe sad MMN was absent in patients with MDD, whereas the happy and angry MMN components were similar across groups. The abnormal sad emotional MMN component was not significantly correlated with the HRSD-17 and HAMA scores, respectively.ConclusionThe data indicate that patients with MDD are impaired in their ability to automatically process sad prosody, whereas their ability to process happy and angry prosodies remains normal. The dysfunctional sad emotion-related MMN in patients with MDD were not correlated with depression symptoms. The blunted MMN of sad prosodies could be considered a trait of MDD.

Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): A review and meta-analysis of studies in psychiatric and neurological disorders

“…Pang et al (2014) found that sad prosodies in meaningless words did not elicit aMMN in comparison to neutral prosody in depression patients while no differences were found for happy or angry prosody in comparison to healthy controls. The aMMN did not correlate with depressive symptoms.…”

“…The lack of correlation between aMMN Pang et al, 2014;Takei et al, 2009) and depression symptoms suggests that sensorycognitive deficit in depression is a trait-not a state-dependent phenomenon.…”

“…The neural mechanisms underlying disturbances in cognitive functions are poorly understood, and they may be present even at the level of automatic information processing (for a review, see Beck, 2008). Therefore several studies used aMMN (or its magnetic counterpart, MMNm) to study automatic sensorycognitive processes in depression (Iv, Zhao, Gong, Chen, & Miao, 2010;K€ ahk€ onen et al, 2007;Lepist€ o et al, 2004;Pang et al, 2014;Takei et al, 2009) and BP (Andersson, Barder, Hellvin, Løvdahl, & Malt, 2008;Takei et al, 2010). Takei et al applied magnetoencephalography to measure information processing deficit in depression (2009) andBP (2010).…”

The effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self-generated and nonself voices: An ERP study

“…Importantly, the concurrent processing of vocal information was found to take place in early stages of information processing-that is, within the first 200 ms after voice stimulus onset (Beauchemin et al, 2006;Charest et al, 2009;Holeckova, Fischer, Giard, Delpuech, & Morlet, 2006;Kaganovich et al, 2006;Knösche, Lattner, Maess, Schauer, & Friederici, 2002;Titova & Näätänen, 2001). Besides the parallel processing of voice information, MMN studies demonstrated that concurrent linguistic processes (e.g., phonological, lexical, semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic) occur very early in the information-processing stream within the MMN time window (Kujala et al, 2010;Kujala, Tervaniemi, & Schröger, 2007;Näätänen et al, 2007;Pakarinen et al, 2009;E. Pang et al, 1998;Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2006).…”

“…In contrast, if these processes are not modulated by stimulus complexity, then the electrophysiological signatures of self-generated and nonself voice processing should be similar in the VCC and WCC conditions. Since we controlled for the physical differences between the voice stimuli (in line with earlier MMN studies: Graux et al, 2013;Graux et al, 2015;Leitman, Foxe, Sehatpour, Shpaner, & Javitt, 2009;Leitman, Sehatpour, Garidis, Gomez-Ramirez, & Javitt, 2011;X. Pang et al, 2014;Schirmer & Escoffier, 2010;Schirmer, Simpson, & Escoffier, 2007;Schirmer, Striano, & Friederici, 2005), using a Blike from like^subtraction approach, we hypothesized a nonsignificant association between voice acoustic properties and ERP measures of self-generated voice processing.…”