Impaired emotional categorisation in young people at increased familial risk of depression

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.016Get rights and content

Abstract

Negative biases in emotional information processing are characteristic of patients with acute depression and may persist after clinical recovery. It is not clear, however, whether such biases are present before the onset of the depressive disorder. The aim of the present study was to examine whether young people at risk of depression, by virtue of having a depressed biological parent (FH+), demonstrate negative biases in tasks of emotional facial recognition and emotional categorization. We also assessed whether task performance and the influence of parental depression are modified by allelic variation in the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene. We found that the FH+ participants did not show evidence of negative biases relative to matched controls. They were, however, significantly slower to perform a task of emotional categorization. 5HTT genotype did not influence emotional processing significantly. We conclude that negative biases in emotional processing do not appear to be present in people with a family history of depression. However, impairment in emotional categorization could identify a high-risk phenotype and may indicate that people at genetic risk of depression have difficulty in using “mood as information”.

Introduction

Cognitive theories of depression suggest that negative schemata structure how information is attended to, interpreted and remembered (Rinck & Becker, 2005). Several studies have demonstrated an association between acute depression and the preferential processing of negatively valenced emotional information (Bradley, Mogg, Millar, & White, 1995; Leppanen, 2006, Murphy et al., 1999) and there is also evidence that abnormal emotional processing may persist in the non-depressed state (Bhagwagar, Cowen, Goodwin, & Harmer, 2004; Hayward, Goodwin, Cowen, & Harmer, 2005; Leppanen, 2006). These observations raise the important possibility that emotional biases might pre-date the onset of clinical depression and thereby represent a risk factor for the subsequent development of illness in predisposed individuals.

To investigate emotional biases prior to the onset of depression it is necessary to study people who are at risk of depression but who have not suffered clinical illness. Numerous risk factors for depression have been described but one of the most reliable is family inheritance. It has been estimated that by young adulthood up to 40% of children of parents with a clinical mood disorder will have suffered a personal episode of depression (Beardslee, Versage, & Gladstone, 1998; Weissman, Fendrich, Warner, & Wickramaratne, 1992). A particular genetic factor that has been linked with the development of depression is allelic variation in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene, whereby carriers of the short allele of the 5HTT have a greater risk of developing depression in response to stressful life events (Caspi et al., 2003). Intriguingly, subjects with a short allele of the 5HTT also show increased neural responses to fearful facial expression in functional imaging studies (Hariri et al., 2005), suggesting that the short allele may facilitate processing of negative emotional information, perhaps thereby worsening the psychological impact of adverse life experiences.

The aim of the present study was to investigate selected aspects of emotional processing in young people who had a parent affected by depression but no personal history of depression themselves. In previous studies we have found that recovered depressed patients showed negative biases in tasks involving facial expression recognition and emotional categorisation (Bhagwagar et al., 2004, Hayward et al., 2005) and in the present investigation wished to see if similar biases might be present in the young at risk group. In addition, we also assessed the influence of allelic variation of the 5HTT to test the hypothesis that possession of the short allele would add to the effect of family history in producing increased sensitivity to the recognition of fearful facial expressions.

Section snippets

Participants

We recruited 58 young people (41 women and 17 men) mean age 19.1 years (range 17–21 years) who had never personally suffered from depression but who had a biological parent with a history of major depression (FH+). Potential participants were assessed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders Schedule (SCID-I) (First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 1997) to exclude a personal current or previous history of major depression. The presence of major depression in a parent was

Current mental state and genotyping

There were no significant group differences in current mental state, perceived stress, neuroticism and IQ (Table 1). Genotyping data were available for 57 FH+ participants and 56 controls. Neither sample deviated significantly from the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (χ2 > 0.05). There were no significant group differences in genotype or allele frequency between the FH+ participants and controls (χ2 = 0.57, d.f. = 2, p = 0.75). Overall 69 subjects had an S allele and 44 were homozygous for the LL allele.

Discussion

As noted in Section 1, patients with depression exhibit a number of negative biases in the processing of emotional information. For example, depressed patients show decreased recognition of happy facial expressions (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004; Surguladze et al., 2004) and increased recall of recently learned negatively valenced words (Rinck & Becker, 2005). Some of these negative biases appear to persist in recovered depressed patients (see Leppanen, 2006). The FH+ participants

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants for taking part in the study. The study was funded by the MRC. PJC is an MRC Clinical Scientist.

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