Original article/Article originalEarly perceptual anomaly of negative facial expression in depression: An event-related potential studyMise en évidence, au moyen des potentiels liés à l’événement, d’anomalies du traitement perceptif précoce des expressions faciales négatives dans la dépression
Introduction
Depression is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive low mood and anhedonia [12]. Cognitive theories of depression have suggested that depression is characterized by biased processing of emotional information, which may be related to its emotion dysregulation [17]. One theory postulated that existing memory representations lead individuals to selectively attend negative-information from the environment. Beck theorized that themes of loss, failure, worthlessness and other negative traits present in memory representations create a systematic bias in their processing of environmental information that is relevant to these themes [2]. Gotlib and Neubauer have found that these negative themes influence information processing in depression by promoting the salience of negative material and by reducing the salience of positive material [19].
Using emotional stimuli, numerous studies have demonstrated a cognitive bias in depressed patients, observed as enhanced responsiveness and memory specifically to negative materials [15], [18], [21], [25], [26]. In a facial recognition task, findings revealed that patients with depression displayed a significantly longer reaction time to sad facial expressions when compared with healthy individuals [15]. According to a meta-analysis of studies assessing recall performance, depressed people remembered 10% more negative words than they did positive words [26]. Cognitive models of depression have been proposed to interpret cognitive bias in depression, suggesting that depression is associated with biases across several stages of information processing, including perception and attention, interpretation and working memory [24]. The existence of negative biases in perception and attention, interpretation, and memory in depression remains a point of controversy [4], [6], [7], [8], [17], [22], [34]. Many studies have focused on working memory and have observed a bias specific to sad faces in depression [6], [32], [34]. However, little is known about how early perceptual processing is modulated by emotional facial stimuli and whether this may lead to a negative bias in depression. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs), which provide high temporal resolution, to investigate the time course of early perceptual processes of emotional facial expression in depression.
In healthy people, two early ERP components, P1 and N170, have been widely investigated during early perception of emotional faces [6], [23], [29], [34]. The P1 is a positive-direction component, which appears at parieto-occipital sites around 70–130 ms and is thought to relate to processing of low-level features of stimuli [27]. The N170 is a well-known ERP component that has been specifically related to face processing [3]. For facial stimuli, the N170 has a maximal negative peak around 170 ms at occipito-temporal sites after stimulus onset [3]. Deldin et al. reported that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) demonstrated a reduction in the N200 component (i.e., the face-specific N170) to faces [9]. Righart et al. suggested that P1 might reflect an early stage of face detection preceding face configural processing represented by N170 [29]. However, few studies have examined both P1 and N170 to study early perception bias in depression. Additionally, several studies have found inconsistent results on P1 component behavior in depression [7], [8]. Dai and Feng found larger overall P1 amplitudes for patients with MDD compared to control participants in a negative affective priming task [8]. However, they also reported no significant difference of P1 amplitudes between MDD patients and control participants while judging the intensity of facial expression [7]. This inconsistency may result from a pathway difference between the tasks. In depressed patients, it still remains unclear which and how early ERP components are modulated by emotional facial stimuli. More studies on the early stages of cognition in depression are needed. Specifically including both P1 and N170 components in this analysis would help to elucidate the cognitive bias in early perception stage and accumulate materials for a more comprehensive understanding of cognitive influence in subsequent tasks.
To address these questions, we recruited 22 depressed patients and the same number of healthy controls who participated in a cued target-response task with emotional facial expression as stimuli. EEG signals and behavior response during the experiment were recorded. With the collected data, we examined the two early ERP components, P1 and N170, in both groups under the same emotional facial stimuli.
Section snippets
Participants and stimuli
Twenty-two outpatients with depression (denoted as MDD, age: 31.68 ± 9.75 years; male/female: 12/10) were recruited from Shanghai Mental Health Center. All depressed subjects fulfilled ICD-10 diagnosis criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) and had no history of manic episode. Twenty-two age-matched healthy controls (denoted as HC, age: 33.91 ± 8.93 years; male/female: 9/13) were recruited from the local community in Shanghai, China. All healthy controls had no history of psychosis, substance
Behavioral results
Analyses on accuracy showed no main effects of group, emotion or CTI [F(1,38) = 1.202, P = 0.280; F(2,76) = 2.958, P = 0.060; F(2,76) = 2.865, P = 0.074]. The mean accuracy was 96.5% for MDD and 97.7% for HC (Fig. 2a), respectively, which showed that participants were engaged with the cued-response task. Repeated-measures ANOVA on response time revealed significant main effects of CTI [F(2,76) = 72.216, P < 0.001], a significant main effect of emotion [F(2,76) = 5.243, P = 0.007], and a tendency of significant
Discussion
The present study was designed to explore the early perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in depression. The behavioral results showed that depressed patients had faster response times for sad faces than for neutral faces, which suggested that cognitive bias of emotional facial expression in depression may had an influence on the subsequent digit target selection task. The ERP results showed that depressed patients had larger P1 amplitudes for all emotional faces but no
Disclosure of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interest.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (60901025), Shanghai Key Laboratory of Psychotic Disorders (13dz2260500), and Shanghai Science and Technology Committee (134119b0300), Advanced Appropriate Technology Promotion Projects of Shanghai Health System (2013SY003).
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These authors contributed equally to this work.