Negative bias effects during audiovisual emotional processing in major depression disorder

Abstract

Aberrant affective neural processing and negative emotional bias are trait-marks of major depression disorders (MDDs). However, most research on biased emotional perception in depression has only focused on unimodal experimental stimuli, the neural basis of potentially biased emotional processing of multimodal inputs remains unclear. Here, we addressed this issue by implementing an audiovisual emotional task during functional MRI scanning sessions with 37 patients with MDD and 37 gender-, age-and education-matched healthy controls. Participants were asked to distinguish laughing and crying sounds while being exposed to faces with different emotional valences as background. We combined general linear model and psychophysiological interaction analyses to identify abnormal local functional activity and integrative processes during audiovisual emotional processing in MDD patients. At the local neural level, MDD patients showed increased bias activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) while listening to negative auditory stimuli and concurrently processing visual facial expressions, along with decreased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity in both the positive and negative visual facial conditions. At the network level, MDD exhibited significantly decreased connectivity in areas involved in automatic emotional processes and voluntary control systems during perception of negative stimuli, including the vmPFC, dlPFC, insula, as well as the subcortical regions of posterior cingulate cortex and striatum. These findings support a multimodal emotion dysregulation hypothesis for MDD by demonstrating that negative bias effects may be facilitated by the excessive ventral bottom-up negative emotional influences along with incapability in dorsal prefrontal top-down control system.

Declarative Memory Impairment and Emotional Bias in Recurrent Depression with a Seasonal Pattern: The Interplay between Emotion and Cognition in Seasonal Affective Disorder

“…Patients with MDD exhibit decreased ability of retrieval in declarative memory [ 53 , 54 , 56 ], linked to the hippocampal functionality, and recent evidence suggests a dual role of the intermediate hippocampus in memory and affective information processes [ 57 ]. Moreover, MDD is characterized by a processing bias toward the negative aspect of the environment that can be considered a key component in depression [ 58 ].…”

The conscious processing of emotion in depression disorder: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…The characteristics of included studies are shown in Table 1 . Among 28 included studies, 20 studies ( 17 – 19 , 40 – 47 , 49 , 50 , 52 , 53 , 55 , 57 – 59 , 61 ) were published in English and 8 ( 37 – 39 , 48 , 51 , 54 , 56 , 60 ) were in Chinese. A total of 656 patients with depression and 680 healthy subjects were involved.…”

“…The average age of participants ranged from 15 to 66 years old, and only 2 studies ( 40 , 55 ) focused on youths with depression. Depressive patients in 20 studies ( 17 – 19 , 40 – 47 , 49 , 50 , 52 – 55 , 57 , 59 , 61 ) were diagnosed according to the DSM, 1 ( 37 ) in the light of CCMD, and 2 ( 51 , 58 ) based on ICD; 3 studies applied DSM-IV and CCMD-3 ( 38 , 39 , 60 ); 1 used both DSM-IV and ICD-10 ( 56 ); 1 adopted CCMD-3 and ICD-10 ( 48 ). Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, Montgomery–Asberg Depression Scale, Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, and Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised were adopted to screen depression.…”

A distinctive subcortical functional connectivity pattern linking negative affect and treatment outcome in major depressive disorder

“…Cultural diversity may partly account for the discrepancy because this item remains controversial in the Chinese version of the PANAS [ 61 , 62 ], showing moderate correlation with both positive and negative affect. On the other hand, this interesting result may reflect a negative bias effect during emotion processing in MDD [ 63 ]. Consistently, previous evidence has suggested that increased level of alert is associated with anxiety [ 64 , 65 ].…”