Dataset Information

Bias and discriminability during emotional signal detection in melancholic depression.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Cognitive disturbances in depression are pernicious and so contribute strongly to the burden of the disorder. Cognitive function has been traditionally studied by challenging subjects with modality-specific psychometric tasks and analysing performance using standard analysis of variance. Whilst informative, such an approach may miss deeper perceptual and inferential mechanisms that potentially unify apparently divergent emotional and cognitive deficits. Here, we sought to elucidate basic psychophysical processes underlying the detection of emotionally salient signals across individuals with melancholic and non-melancholic depression.

Methods

Sixty participants completed an Affective Go/No-Go (AGN) task across negative, positive and neutral target stimuli blocks. We employed hierarchical Bayesian signal detection theory (SDT) to model psychometric performance across three equal groups of those with melancholic depression, those with a non-melancholic depression and healthy controls. This approach estimated likely response profiles (bias) and perceptual sensitivity (discriminability). Differences in the means of these measures speak to differences in the emotional signal detection between individuals across the groups, while differences in the variance reflect the heterogeneity of the groups themselves.

Results

Melancholic participants showed significantly decreased sensitivity to positive emotional stimuli compared to those in the non-melancholic group, and also had a significantly lower discriminability than healthy controls during the detection of neutral signals. The melancholic group also showed significantly higher variability in bias to both positive and negative emotionally salient material.

Conclusions

Disturbances of emotional signal detection in melancholic depression appear dependent on emotional context, being biased during the detection of positive stimuli, consistent with a noisier representation of neutral stimuli. The greater heterogeneity of the bias across the melancholic group is consistent with a more labile disorder (i.e. variable across the day). Future work will aim to understand how these findings reflect specific individual differences (e.g. prior cognitive biases) and clarify whether such biases change dynamically during cognitive tasks as internal models of the sensorium are refined and updated in response to experience.

SUBMITTER: Hyett M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4022535 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Bias and discriminability during emotional signal detection in melancholic depression.

Hyett Matthew M Parker Gordon G Breakspear Michael M

BMC psychiatry 20140427

<h4>Background</h4>Cognitive disturbances in depression are pernicious and so contribute strongly to the burden of the disorder. Cognitive function has been traditionally studied by challenging subjects with modality-specific psychometric tasks and analysing performance using standard analysis of variance. Whilst informative, such an approach may miss deeper perceptual and inferential mechanisms that potentially unify apparently divergent emotional and cognitive deficits. Here, we sought to eluc ...[more]

PMID: 24766992

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Project description:BackgroundThe dominant diagnostic model of the classification of depression today is unitarian; however, since Kurt Schneider (1920) introduced the concept of endogenous depression and reactive depression, the binary model has still often been used on a clinical basis. Notwithstanding this, to our knowledge, there have been no collective data on how psychiatrists differentiate these two conditions. We therefore conducted a survey to examine how psychiatrists in Japan differentiate patients with major depressive disorder who present mainly with melancholic features and those with reactive features.MethodsThree case scenarios of melancholic and reactive depression, and one-in-between were prepared. These cases were designed to present with at least 5 symptoms listed in the DSM-IV-TR with severity being mild. We have sent the questionnaires regarding treatment options and diagnosis for those three cases on a 7-point Likert scale (1 =?"not appropriate", 4 =?"cannot tell", and 7 =?"appropriate"). Five hundred and two psychiatrists from over one hundred hospitals and community clinics throughout Japan have participated in this survey.ResultsThe melancholic case resulted significantly higher than the reactive case on either antidepressants (mean ± SD: 5.9 ± 1.2 vs. 3.6 ± 1.7, p < 0.001), hypnotics (mean ± SD: 5.5 ± 1.1 vs. 5.0 ± 1.3, p < 0.001), and electroconvulsive therapy (mean ± SD: 1.5 ± 0.9 vs. 1.2 ± 0.6, p < 0.001). On the other hand, the reactive case resulted in significantly higher scores compared to the melancholic case and the one- in-between cases in regards to psychotherapy (mean ± SD: 4.9 ± 1.4 vs. 4.3 ± 1.4 vs. 4.7 ± 1.5, p < 0.001, respectively). Scores for informing patients that they suffered from "depression" were significantly higher in the melancholic case, compared to the reactive case (mean ± SD: 4.7 ± 1.7 vs. 2.2 ± 1.4, p < 0.001).ConclusionsJapanese psychiatrists distinguish between major depressive disorder with melancholic and reactive features, and thus choose different treatment strategies regarding pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy.

Project description:Threatening stimuli seem to capture attention more swiftly than neutral stimuli. This attention bias has been observed under different experimental conditions and with different types of stimuli. It remains unclear whether this adaptive behaviour reflects the function of automatic or controlled attention mechanisms. Additionally, the spatiotemporal dynamics of its neural correlates are largely unknown. The present study investigates these issues using an Emotional Flanker Task synchronized with EEG recordings. A group of 32 healthy participants saw response-relevant images (emotional scenes from IAPS or line drawings of objects) flanked by response-irrelevant distracters (i.e., emotional scenes flanked by line drawings or vice versa). We assessed behavioural and ERP responses drawn from four task conditions (Threat-Central, Neutral-Central, Threat-Peripheral, and Neutral-Peripheral) and subjected these responses to repeated-measures ANOVA models. When presented as response-relevant targets, threatening images attracted faster and more accurate responses. They did not affect response accuracy to targets when presented as response-irrelevant flankers. However, response times were significantly slower when threatening images flanked objects than when neutral images were shown as flankers. This result replicated the well-known Emotional Flanker Effect. Behavioural responses to response-relevant threatening targets were accompanied by significant modulations of ERP activity across all time-windows and regions of interest and displayed some meaningful correlations. The Emotional Flanker Effect was accompanied by a modulation over parietal and central-parietal regions within a time-window between 550-690ms. Such a modulation suggests that the attentional disruption to targets caused by response-irrelevant threatening flankers appears to reflect less neural resources available, which are seemingly drawn away by distracting threatening flankers. The observed spatiotemporal dynamics seem to concur with understanding of the important adaptive role attributed to threat-related attention bias.

Project description:BackgroundMajor depressive episodes (MDEs) show diverse cortisol level alterations. Heterogeneity in symptom profiles, symptom severity and cortisol specimens may explain these heterogeneous results. Less severely ill out-patients with a non-melancholic MDE (NM-MDE) may have a variation in the rhythm of cortisol secretion rather than in its concentration.MethodCortisol measures were taken (a) over a short-term period (12 h) by measuring daily salivary output using the area under the curve with respect to the ground (AUCg) and (b) over a long-term period (3 months) in hair. Additionally, cortisol reactivity measures in saliva - the cortisol awakening response and the 30 min delta cortisol secretion after awakening (DELTA) - were investigated in 19 patients with a melancholic MDE (M-MDE) and 52 with a NM-MDE, and in 40 matched controls who were recruited from the UK and Chile. Depression severity scores were correlated with different cortisol measures.ResultsThe NM-MDE group showed a decreased AUCg in comparison with controls (P = 0.02), but normal cortisol reactivity and long-term cortisol levels. The M-MDE group did not exhibit any significant cortisol alterations nor an association with depression severity scores. Higher Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score was linked with decreased hair cortisol concentration (HCC, P = 0.05) and higher DELTA (P = 0.04) in NM-MDEs, whereas decreased HCC was the sole alteration associated with out-patients with severe M-MDEs.ConclusionsThe contrasting short- and long-term cortisol output results are compatible with an alteration in the rhythm of cortisol secretion in NM-MDEs. This alteration may consist of large and/or intense episodes of hypercortisolaemia in moderate NM-MDEs and frequent, but brief and sharp early-morning DELTAs in its severe form. These changes may reflect the effects of environmental factors or episodes of nocturnal hypercortisolaemia that were not measured by the short-term samples used in this study.

Dataset Information

Bias and discriminability during emotional signal detection in melancholic depression.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Bias and discriminability during emotional signal detection in melancholic depression.

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