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Self‐referential processing and emotion context insensitivity in major depressive disorder
Author(s) -
McIvor Lucy,
Sui Jie,
Malhotra Tina,
Drury David,
Kumar Sanjay
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.14782
Subject(s) - psychology , emotion perception , perception , salience (neuroscience) , stimulus (psychology) , attentional bias , facial expression , valence (chemistry) , negativity bias , context (archaeology) , cognitive bias , cognitive psychology , cognition , communication , paleontology , physics , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , biology
We examined whether differential self‐perception influences the salience of emotional stimuli in depressive disorders, using a perceptual matching task in which geometric shapes were arbitrarily assigned to the self and an unknown other. Participants associated shapes with personal labels (e.g. “self” or “other”). Each geometric shape additionally contained a happy, sad or neutral line drawing of a face. Participants then judged whether shape‐label pairs were as originally shown or re‐paired, whilst facial emotion was task‐irrelevant. The results showed biased responses to self‐relevant stimuli compared to other‐relevant stimuli, regardless of facial emotion, for both control and depressed participants. This was reflected in sensitivity ( d ′) and drift rate ( v ) measures, suggesting that self‐bias and a bias towards emotion may reflect different underlying processes. We further computed bias scores by subtracting the “neutral” value of each measure (acting as baseline) from the “happy” and “sad” values of each measure, indexing an “emotional bias” (EB) score for “self” and “other” separately. Compared to control participants, depressed participants exhibited reduced “happy” and “sad” emotional biases, regardless of the self‐relevance of stimuli. This finding indicates that depressed participants may exhibit generalised Emotion Context Insensitivity (ECI), characterised by hyopoattention to both positive and negative information, at short stimulus presentations. The implications of this are discussed.