Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion–cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder...

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Main Authors:	Linden, Stefanie C., Jackson, Margaret C., Subramanian, Leena, Healy, David, Linden, David E.J.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press 2011
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3245890/

id	pubmed-3245890
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-32458902011-12-28 Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression Linden, Stefanie C. Jackson, Margaret C. Subramanian, Leena Healy, David Linden, David E.J. Research Report Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion–cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of “sad benefit”, which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes. Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press 2011-12 /pmc/articles/PMC3245890/ /pubmed/21872338 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2011.08.002 Text en © 2011 Elsevier B.V. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Open Access under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) license
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Linden, Stefanie C. Jackson, Margaret C. Subramanian, Leena Healy, David Linden, David E.J.
spellingShingle	Linden, Stefanie C. Jackson, Margaret C. Subramanian, Leena Healy, David Linden, David E.J. Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
author_facet	Linden, Stefanie C. Jackson, Margaret C. Subramanian, Leena Healy, David Linden, David E.J.
author_sort	Linden, Stefanie C.
title	Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
title_short	Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
title_full	Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
title_fullStr	Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
title_full_unstemmed	Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression
title_sort	sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression
description	Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion–cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of “sad benefit”, which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes.
publisher	Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press
publishDate	2011
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3245890/
_version_	1611496496667033600

Sad benefit in face working memory: An emotional bias of melancholic depression

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