Open AccessNegative bias effects during audiovisual emotional processing in major depression disorder
Author(s) -
Li Liyuan,
Li Rong,
Shen Fei,
Wang Xuyang,
Zou Ting,
Deng Chijun,
Wang Chong,
Li Jiyi,
Wang Hongyu,
Huang Xinju,
Lu Fengmei,
He Zongling,
Chen Huafu
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
human brain mapping
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.005
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1097-0193
pISSN - 1065-9471
DOI - 10.1002/hbm.25735
Subject(s) - psychology , dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , ventromedial prefrontal cortex , insula , functional magnetic resonance imaging , facial expression , major depressive disorder , prefrontal cortex , anterior cingulate cortex , neural correlates of consciousness , neuroscience , cognitive psychology , audiology , amygdala , cognition , medicine , communication
Aberrant affective neural processing and negative emotional bias are trait‐marks of major depression disorders (MDDs). However, most research on biased emotional perception in depression has only focused on unimodal experimental stimuli, the neural basis of potentially biased emotional processing of multimodal inputs remains unclear. Here, we addressed this issue by implementing an audiovisual emotional task during functional MRI scanning sessions with 37 patients with MDD and 37 gender‐, age‐ and education‐matched healthy controls. Participants were asked to distinguish laughing and crying sounds while being exposed to faces with different emotional valences as background. We combined general linear model and psychophysiological interaction analyses to identify abnormal local functional activity and integrative processes during audiovisual emotional processing in MDD patients. At the local neural level, MDD patients showed increased bias activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) while listening to negative auditory stimuli and concurrently processing visual facial expressions, along with decreased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity in both the positive and negative visual facial conditions. At the network level, MDD exhibited significantly decreased connectivity in areas involved in automatic emotional processes and voluntary control systems during perception of negative stimuli, including the vmPFC, dlPFC, insula, as well as the subcortical regions of posterior cingulate cortex and striatum. These findings support a multimodal emotion dysregulation hypothesis for MDD by demonstrating that negative bias effects may be facilitated by the excessive ventral bottom‐up negative emotional influences along with incapability in dorsal prefrontal top‐down control system.