CONTACT US: Contact info
|
Citation |
Watters AJ, Harris AWF, Williams LM. Biol. Psychol. 2018; 136: 127-135. |
|
Affiliation |
Brain Dynamics Centre, The Westmead Institute for Medical Research, University of Sydney, 176 Hawkesbury Rd., Westmead, NSW 2145, Australia; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford University, 401 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA 94305-5717, USA; VA Palo Alto (Sierra-Pacific MIRECC), California 3801 Miranda Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304-151Y, USA. Electronic address: leawilliams@stanford.edu. |
|
Copyright |
(Copyright © 2018, Elsevier Publishing) |
|
DOI |
|
PMID |
29792907 |
|
Abstract |
Facial expressions signaling threat and mood-congruent loss have been used to probe abnormal neural reactivity in major depressive disorder (MDD) and may be implicated in genetic vulnerability to MDD. This study investigated electro-cortical reactivity to facial expressions 101 unaffected, adult first degree relatives of probands with MDD and non-relative controls (n = 101). We investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) to five facial expressions of basic emotion: fear, anger, disgust, sadness and happiness under both subliminal (masked) and conscious (unmasked) presentation conditions, and the source localization of group differences. In the conscious condition, controls showed a distinctly positive-going shift in responsive to negative versus happy faces, reflected in a greater positivity for the VPP frontally and the P300 parietally, and less negativity for the N200. By contrast, relatives showed less differentiation of emotions, reflected in less VPP and P300 positivity, particularly for anger and disgust, and which produced an enhanced N200 for sadness. These group differences were consistently source localized to the anterior cingulate cortex. The findings contribute new evidence for neural disruptions underlying the differentiation of salient emotions in familial risk for depression. These disruptions occur in the appraisal (∼200 ms post-stimulus) through to the context evaluation (∼300 ms+ post-stimulus) phases of of emotion processing, consistent with theories that risk for depression involves biased or attenuated processing of emotion. Language: en |
|
Keywords |
Event-Related Potentials; depression; emotion; facial expressions; first degree relatives; high risk |