Dataset Information

Feeling addressed! The neural processing of social communicative cues in patients with major depression.

ABSTRACT: The feeling of being addressed is the first step in a complex processing stream enabling successful social communication. Social impairments are a relevant characteristic of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we investigated a mechanism which-if impaired-might contribute to withdrawal or isolation in MDD, namely, the neural processing of social cues such as body orientation and gesture. During funtional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquisition, 33 patients with MDD and 43 healthy control subjects watched video clips of a speaking actor: one version with a gesture accompanying the speech and one without gesture. Videos were filmed simultaneously from two different viewpoints: one with the actor facing the viewer head-on (frontal) and one side-view (lateral). After every clip, the participants were instructed to evaluate whether they felt addressed or not. Despite overall comparable addressment ratings and a large overlap in activation patterns in MDD and healthy subjects for gesture processing, the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral superior/middle frontal cortex, and right angular gyrus were more strongly activated in patients than in healthy subjects for the frontal conditions. Our analyses revealed that patients showed specifically higher activation than healthy subjects for the frontal condition without gesture in regions including the posterior cingulate cortex, left prefrontal cortex, and the left hippocampus. We conclude that MDD patients can recognize and interpret social cues such as gesture or body orientation; however, they seem to require more neural resources. This additional effort might affect successful communication and contribute to social isolation in MDD.

SUBMITTER: Suffel A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7416026 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Feeling addressed! The neural processing of social communicative cues in patients with major depression.

Suffel Anne A Nagels Arne A Steines Miriam M Kircher Tilo T Straube Benjamin B

Human brain mapping 20200520 13

The feeling of being addressed is the first step in a complex processing stream enabling successful social communication. Social impairments are a relevant characteristic of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we investigated a mechanism which-if impaired-might contribute to withdrawal or isolation in MDD, namely, the neural processing of social cues such as body orientation and gesture. During funtional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquisition, 33 patients with MDD an ...[more]

PMID: 32432387

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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

Feeling addressed! The neural processing of social communicative cues in patients with major depression.

Publications

Feeling addressed! The neural processing of social communicative cues in patients with major depression.

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