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Neural correlates of depressive realism--an fMRI study on causal attribution in depression.

ABSTRACT: Biased causal attribution is a critical factor in the cognitive model of depression. Whereas depressed patients interpret events negatively, healthy people show a self-serving bias (internal attribution of positive events and external attribution of negative events).Using fMRI, depressed patients (n=15) and healthy controls (n=15) were confronted with positive and negative social events and made causal attributions (internal vs. external). Functional data were analyzed using a mixed effects model.Behaviourally, controls showed a self-serving bias, whereas patients demonstrated a balanced attributional pattern. Analysis of functional data revealed a significant group difference in a fronto-temporal network. Higher activation of this network was associated with non self-serving attributions in controls but self-serving attributions in patients. Applying a psycho-physiological interaction analysis, we observed reduced coupling between a dorsomedial PFC seed region and limbic areas during self-serving attributions in patients compared to controls.Results of the PPI analysis are preliminary given the liberal statistical threshold.The association of the behaviourally less frequent attributional pattern with activation in a fronto-temporal network suggests that non self-serving responses may produce a self-related response conflict in controls, while self-serving responses produce this conflict in patients. Moreover, attribution-modulated coupling between the dorsomedial PFC and limbic regions was weaker in patients than controls. This preliminary finding suggests that depression may be associated with disturbances in fronto-limbic coupling during attributional decisions. Our results implicate that treatment of major depression may benefit from approaches that facilitate reinterpretation of emotional events in a more positive, more self-serving way.

SUBMITTER: Seidel EM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3565123 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural correlates of depressive realism--an fMRI study on causal attribution in depression.

Seidel Eva-Maria EM Satterthwaite Theodore D TD Eickhoff Simon B SB Schneider Frank F Gur Ruben C RC Wolf Daniel H DH Habel Ute U Derntl Birgit B

Journal of affective disorders 20120227 3

<h4>Background</h4>Biased causal attribution is a critical factor in the cognitive model of depression. Whereas depressed patients interpret events negatively, healthy people show a self-serving bias (internal attribution of positive events and external attribution of negative events).<h4>Methods</h4>Using fMRI, depressed patients (n=15) and healthy controls (n=15) were confronted with positive and negative social events and made causal attributions (internal vs. external). Functional data were ...[more]

PMID: 22377511

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Project description:Impaired mental state attribution is a core social cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study examined the extent to which the core neural system of mental state attribution is involved in mental state attribution, focusing on belief attribution and emotion attribution. Fifteen schizophrenia outpatients and 14 healthy controls performed two mental state attribution tasks in the scanner. In a Belief Attribution Task, after reading a short vignette, participants were asked infer either the belief of a character (a false belief condition) or a physical state of an affair (a false photograph condition). In an Emotion Attribution Task, participants were asked either to judge whether character(s) in pictures felt unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral emotion (other condition) or to look at pictures that did not have any human characters (view condition). fMRI data were analyzing focusing on a priori regions of interest (ROIs) of the core neural systems of mental state attribution: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and precuneus. An exploratory whole brain analysis was also performed. Both patients and controls showed greater activation in all four ROIs during the Belief Attribution Task than the Emotion Attribution Task. Patients also showed less activation in the precuneus and left TPJ compared to controls during the Belief Attribution Task. No significant group difference was found during the Emotion Attribution Task in any of ROIs. An exploratory whole brain analysis showed a similar pattern of neural activations. These findings suggest that while schizophrenia patients rely on the same neural network as controls do when attributing beliefs of others, patients did not show reduced activation in the key regions such as the TPJ. Further, this study did not find evidence for aberrant neural activation during emotion attribution or recruitment of compensatory brain regions in schizophrenia.

Project description:ObjectivesRapid advances in genetic research and increased use of genetic testing have increased the emphasis on genetic causes of epilepsy in patient encounters. Research in other disorders suggests that genetic causal attributions can influence patients' psychological responses and coping strategies, but little is known about how epilepsy patients and their relatives will respond to genetic attributions of epilepsy. We investigated the possibility that among members of families containing multiple individuals with epilepsy, depression, the most frequent psychiatric comorbidity in the epilepsies, might be related to the perception that epilepsy has a genetic cause.MethodsA self-administered survey was completed by 417 individuals in 104 families averaging 4 individuals with epilepsy per family. Current depression was measured with the Patient Health Questionnaire. Genetic causal attribution was assessed by three questions addressing the following: perceived likelihood of having an epilepsy-related mutation, perceived role of genetics in causing epilepsy in the family, and (in individuals with epilepsy) perceived influence of genetics in causing the individual's epilepsy. Relatives without epilepsy were asked about their perceived chance of developing epilepsy in the future, compared with the average person.ResultsPrevalence of current depression was 14.8% in 182 individuals with epilepsy, 6.5% in 184 biologic relatives without epilepsy, and 3.9% in 51 individuals married into the families. Among individuals with epilepsy, depression was unrelated to genetic attribution. Among biologic relatives without epilepsy, however, prevalence of depression increased with increasing perceived chance of having an epilepsy-related mutation (p = 0.02). This association was not mediated by perceived future epilepsy risk among relatives without epilepsy.SignificanceDepression is associated with perceived likelihood of carrying an epilepsy-related mutation among individuals without epilepsy in families containing multiple affected individuals. This association should be considered when addressing mental health issues in such families.

Dataset Information

Neural correlates of depressive realism--an fMRI study on causal attribution in depression.

Publications

Neural correlates of depressive realism--an fMRI study on causal attribution in depression.

Similar Datasets

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