Recognition of Facial Emotion Expressions in Patients with Depressive Disorders: A Functional MRI Study

Abstract

Background: The present study evaluated the cortical activation during emotional information recognition. Methods: The study group included 16 patients with depression, and 16 healthy subjects were enrolled as a control group. Patients received eight weeks of antidepressant therapy. Functional MRI evaluated the cortical activation twice in the patient group and once in the control group. The fMRI task processed the emotional information with face demonstration from the PennCNP test battery. Results: During the processing of emotional information, patients showed activation in the middle and the inferior frontal gyri, the fusiform gyrus, and the occipital cortex. After treatment, patients showed a significant decrease in the frontal cortex activation for negative face demonstration and no frontal activation for positive emotion recognition. The left superior temporal gyrus activation zone appeared in patients after treatment and in the control group. Healthy subjects showed more intense frontal cortex activation when processing neutral emotions and less when showing happy and sad faces. Activation zones in the amygdala and the insula and deactivation zones in the posterior cingulate cortex were revealed in the controls. Conclusion: This study confirms the hypothesis that anomalies in the processing of emotional stimuli can be a sign of a depressive disorder.

Comparison of Brain Activation According to fMRI Data in Patient with Depression (After Acute Coronary Syndrome and Somatically Healthy) and Healthy Volunteers

“…All the subjects underwent standard and functional magnetic resonance imaging on a tomograph with a magnetic induction of 1.5 T. The patients were tested for the emotional information processing with the Pennsylvania Emotion Recognition Test. The choice of this test was associated with accumulating data such that it allows for identifying the features of the emotionally significant stimuli in depressive patients compared with the controls, both when this test is used independently (10,15) and as part of the fMRI procedure (12). The participants were presented with alternating images of 24 faces with different expressions -joyful, sad, and without emotional expression (10).…”

“…Data processing was made with SPM12 running in MATLAB (r2014b) and xjView applications. fMRI scans were pre-processed using a protocol consisting of slice-time correction, realignment and reslicing, co-registration of the fMRI data to the corresponding anatomical scans, unified segmentation, and normalization of anatomical and functional data to MNI space, and spatial smoothing (12). Sociodemographic and clinical data were analyzed with SPSS Statistics v23.…”

“…A t-test for independent samples was also used to compare brain activation between groups, and a t-test for dependent samples was utilized to compare changes in activation during treatment. Regional activation was considered significant at a cluster-level threshold (t-value) ≥ 2.8 with P < 0.05 corrected to control the whole-brain family-wise error rate (FWE) (12). A prerequisite for the inclusion of patients in the study was the signing of their voluntary informed consent.…”

“…However, no fMRI studies have been conducted on the changes in the areas of brain activation in depressive patients who had ACS. At the same time, one of the most promising paradigms for assessing brain activation is tasks related to the perception of emotionally significant stimuli, for example, various facial expressions ( 11 , 12 ). In this regard, we undertook the present study aiming at studying brain activation in patients with depression after ACS using fMRI and a face recognition paradigm.…”