Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, First Affiliated Hospital, Dalian Medical University, Liaoning Province, China; Research Institute of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine, Dalian Medical University, Liaoning Province, China.
Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, First Affiliated Hospital, Dalian Medical University, Liaoning Province, China.
PLoS One. 2014 Mar 21;9(3):e91995. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091995. eCollection 2014.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an important and highly prevalent mental disorder characterized by anhedonia and a lack of interest in everyday activities. Additionally, patients with MDD appear to have deficits in various cognitive abilities. Although a number of studies investigating the central auditory processing of low-level sound features in patients with MDD have demonstrated that this population exhibits impairments in automatic processing, the influence of emotional voice processing has yet to be addressed. To explore the automatic processing of emotional prosodies in patients with MDD, we analyzed the ability to detect automatic changes using event-related potentials (ERPs).
This study included 18 patients with MDD and 22 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Subjects were instructed to watch a silent movie but to ignore the afferent acoustic emotional prosodies presented to both ears while continuous electroencephalographic activity was synchronously recorded. Prosodies included meaningless syllables, such as "dada" spoken with happy, angry, sad, or neutral tones. The mean amplitudes of the ERPs elicited by emotional stimuli and the peak latency of the emotional differential waveforms were analyzed.
The sad MMN was absent in patients with MDD, whereas the happy and angry MMN components were similar across groups. The abnormal sad emotional MMN component was not significantly correlated with the HRSD-17 and HAMA scores, respectively.
The data indicate that patients with MDD are impaired in their ability to automatically process sad prosody, whereas their ability to process happy and angry prosodies remains normal. The dysfunctional sad emotion-related MMN in patients with MDD were not correlated with depression symptoms. The blunted MMN of sad prosodies could be considered a trait of MDD.
重度抑郁症（MDD）是一种重要且高发的精神障碍，其特征为快感缺失和对日常活动缺乏兴趣。此外，MDD 患者似乎存在各种认知能力缺陷。尽管许多研究调查了 MDD 患者的低水平声音特征的中枢听觉处理，表明该人群在自动处理方面存在障碍，但情感语音处理的影响尚未得到解决。为了探讨 MDD 患者的情感韵律自动处理，我们使用事件相关电位（ERP）分析了检测自动变化的能力。
本研究纳入了 18 例 MDD 患者和 22 例年龄和性别匹配的健康对照者。要求受试者观看无声电影，但忽略双耳呈现的传入声情感韵律，同时同步记录连续脑电活动。韵律包括无意义的音节，如“dada”，以高兴、生气、悲伤或中性语调说出。分析情绪刺激诱发的 ERP 的平均振幅和情绪差异波形的峰值潜伏期。
MDD 患者的悲伤 MMN 缺失，而快乐和愤怒 MMN 成分在两组间相似。异常的悲伤情绪 MMN 成分与 HRSD-17 和 HAMA 评分分别无显著相关性。
数据表明，MDD 患者在自动处理悲伤韵律的能力受损，而处理快乐和愤怒韵律的能力保持正常。MDD 患者的悲伤情绪相关 MMN 功能障碍与抑郁症状无关。悲伤韵律迟钝的 MMN 可被视为 MDD 的一种特征。
