Department of Psychiatry, University of Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53105, Bonn, Germany.
Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2013 Dec;263(8):675-83. doi: 10.1007/s00406-013-0392-5. Epub 2013 Feb 5.
Although major depression is projected to be among the top three causes of disability-adjusted life years lost in 2030, relatively little is known concerning the extent to which depressed mood states can bias social-economic decision making away from optimal outcomes. One experimental framework to study the interaction between negative emotion and social-economic decisions is the ultimatum game (UG), where the fair, cooperative player altruistically punishes the unfair, non-cooperative player. To assess a potential susceptibility of altruistic punishment to depressed mood, we repeatedly administered the UG task to a cohort of 20 currently depressed patients with a diagnosis of recurrent major depressive disorder and 20 healthy controls. Furthermore, valence and arousal ratings of emotionally laden pictures were obtained from all participants in order to assess a depressed mood-related distortion of emotion judgments. Compared to healthy controls, depressed patients over-sanctioned unfair proposals in the UG and judged emotional stimuli too negatively. Thus, major depression is associated with a negative emotional bias that hampers social-economic decision making and produces large personal costs.
尽管预计到 2030 年，重度抑郁症将成为导致伤残调整生命年（衡量疾病和伤害对健康的负面影响的指标）损失的前三大原因之一，但对于抑郁情绪状态在多大程度上会使社会经济决策偏离最佳结果，人们知之甚少。研究负面情绪与社会经济决策之间相互作用的一个实验框架是最后通牒博弈（UG），在这个博弈中，公平、合作的玩家会利他地惩罚不公平、不合作的玩家。为了评估利他惩罚是否容易受到抑郁情绪的影响，我们反复对 20 名目前患有复发性重度抑郁症的抑郁症患者和 20 名健康对照者进行了 UG 任务。此外，我们还要求所有参与者对情感丰富的图片进行效价和唤醒度的评分，以评估情绪判断是否会因抑郁情绪而产生偏差。与健康对照组相比，抑郁患者在 UG 中过度制裁不公平的提议，并且对情绪刺激的评价过于消极。因此，重度抑郁症与负面情绪偏差有关，这会阻碍社会经济决策，并产生巨大的个人成本。
