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Sustained engagement of attention is associated with increased negative self-referent processing in major depressive disorder.

ABSTRACT: This study investigated the link between self-reference and attentional engagement in adults with (n=22) and without (HC; n=24) Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants completed the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET). MDD participants endorsed significantly fewer positive words and more negative words as self-descriptive than HC participants. A whole-scalp data analysis technique revealed that the MDD participants had larger difference wave (negative words minus positive words) ERP amplitudes from 380 to 1000ms across posterior sites, which positively correlated with number of negative words endorsed. No group differences were observed for earlier attentional components (P1, P2). The results suggest that among adults with MDD, negative stimuli capture attention during later information processing; this engagement is associated with greater self-referent endorsement of negative adjectives. Sustained cognitive engagement for self-referent negative stimuli may be an important target for neurocognitive depression interventions.

SUBMITTER: Dainer-Best J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5673529 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sustained engagement of attention is associated with increased negative self-referent processing in major depressive disorder.

Dainer-Best Justin J Trujillo Logan T LT Schnyer David M DM Beevers Christopher G CG

Biological psychology 20170908

This study investigated the link between self-reference and attentional engagement in adults with (n=22) and without (HC; n=24) Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants completed the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET). MDD participants endorsed significantly fewer positive words and more negative words as self-descriptive than HC participants. A whole-scalp data analysis technique revealed that the MDD participants had larger difference wa ...[more]

PMID: 28893596

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Project description:Background: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a moderately heritable disorder with a high lifetime prevalence. At present, laboratory blood tests to support MDD diagnosis are not available. Methods: We used a classifier approach on blood gene expression profiles of a unique set of non-medicated subjects (MDD patients and controls) to select genes of which expression is predictive for disease status. To reveal blood gene expression changes related to MDD disease, we applied a powerful ex vivo stimulus to the blood, i.e. incubation with lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 10 ng/ml blood). Results: Based on LPS-stimulated blood gene expression using whole-genome microarrays in 42 subjects (primary cohort; 21 MDD patients (mean age 42.3 years), 21 healthy controls (mean age 41.9 years)), we identified a set of genes (CAPRIN1, CLEC4A, KRT23, MLC1, PLSCR1, PROK2, ZBTB16) that serves as a molecular signature of MDD. These findings were validated for the primary cohort using an independent quantitative PCR method (P = 0.007). The difference between depressive patients and controls was confirmed (P = 0.019) in a replication cohort of 13 patients with MDD (mean age 42.8 years) and 14 controls (mean age 45.6 years). The MDD-signature score comprised of expression levels of 7 genes could discriminate depressive patients from controls with sensitivity of 76.9% and specificity of 71.8%. Conclusions: We show for the first time that molecular analysis of stimulated blood cells can be used as an endophenotype for MDD diagnosis, which is a milestone in establishing biomarkers for neuropsychiatric disorders with moderate heritability in general. Our results may provide a new entry point for following and predicting treatment outcome, as well as prediction of severity and recurrence of MDD. In total, 33 MDD patients and 34 healthy controls were analyzed using basal gene expression in whole blood, and gene expression from whole blood that was stimulated with LPS for 5-6 h, using microarrays. Patients were arbitrarily selected from all patients to serve as primary cohort (nMDD = 21 (MDD01-MDD21); nControls = 21 (Con01-Con21)), or replication cohort (nMDD = 12 (MDD22-MDD35); nControls = 13 (Con22-Con37)) using microarrays. This submission does not include Samples CON21_LPS or CON30_LPS.

Project description:BackgroundSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) are highly comorbid and share impairments in self-referential and social processing. Many naturalistic judgements activate these processes concurrently, which can be referred to as "self-other referential processing". We sought to examine its neural correlates in young people with SAD and MDD using a novel experimental task.MethodsFifty six young people aged 16 to 25 with diagnoses of SAD and/or MDD (15 with SAD [M = 20.3 years, 60% female], 17 with MDD [M = 19.8 years, 53% female], 24 with comorbid SAD and MDD [M = 19.8 years, 67% female]) and 76 age and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs; M = 20.7 years, 66% female) completed a novel self-other referential processing fMRI task that involved rating how much one related to emotional faces in active conditions and judging how far apart each person's eyes were in control conditions.ResultsParticipants with SAD had more and those with MDD had less activity in social cognitive areas than HCs when processing social information across all conditions and emotion types. Participants with comorbid SAD-MDD exhibited a distinct pattern of neural activity to patients with single diagnoses. Across the whole sample, the activation of reward system areas (the medial orbitofrontal cortex and caudate) in response to increasing relatedness correlated positively with a dimensional measure of social anxiety.ConclusionsYoung people with SAD, MDD and comorbid SAD-MDD showed deficits in social processing, but they were not specifically related to self-other referential processing. Dimensional social anxiety symptoms were correlated with reward system activation, suggesting that such symptoms are associated with an overestimation of the hedonic value of social stimuli. These novel findings have implications for our understanding of the neural correlates of SAD and MDD, suggesting that alterations in social processing and reward functioning underlie the impairments in self and social processing that characterize both disorders.

Dataset Information

Sustained engagement of attention is associated with increased negative self-referent processing in major depressive disorder.

Publications

Sustained engagement of attention is associated with increased negative self-referent processing in major depressive disorder.

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