Depression and Neural Sensitivity to Self-Referential Processing

In two experiments, patients with depression and healthy control subjects were required to read self-relevant stimuli while event related potentiald were recorded (Benau, Hill, Atchley, O'Hare, Gibson, Hajcak et al., 2019).

In the first experiment the processing of emotional words in both groups was applied in order to make a separation among self-relevant effects compared to valence effects. The results showed that patients with depression had a relatively normal modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) ERP component related with affect for high-arousal self-relevant words compared to normative emotional words. This was found to be in contrast to healthy control subjects, as they showed the same enhancement of the LPP amplitude for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, regardless of self-reliance. Patients with depression did only modulate stimuli when they were emotional and were personally relevant (Benau et al., 2019).

In the second experiment, self-evaluative linguistic processing was assessed by investigating the emotional reactivity to normative as compared to ideographic stimuli in patients with depression compared to healthy control subjects. The results of this second experiment revealed that patients suffering from depression were most likely to affirm negative self-referential statements as compared to positive self-referential statements.

Response times in the patient group were slower for both statements as compared to healthy control subjects. The response times for neutral stimuli did not differ among the groups. The ERP results revealed that the LPP was highest for self-referential sentences with a negative final word in the patients with depression. This effect was not found in the healthy control subjects (Benau et al., 2019).