Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
Psychophysiology. 2019 Jul;56(7):e13345. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13345. Epub 2019 Feb 22.
The current research examined how individuals with depression process emotional, self-relevant stimuli. Across two studies, individuals with depression and healthy controls read stimuli that varied in self-relevance while EEG data were recorded. We examined the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP component that captures the dynamic allocation of attention to motivationally salient stimuli. In Study 1, participants read single words in a passive-viewing task. Participants viewed negative, positive, or neutral words that were either normative or self-generated. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants with depression exhibited affective modulation of the LPP for self-generated stimuli only (both positive and negative) and not for normative stimuli; healthy controls exhibited similar affective modulation of the LPP for both self-relevant and normative stimuli. In Study 2, using a separate sample and a different task, stimuli were provided within the context of sentence stems referring to the self or other people. Participants with depression were more likely to endorse negative self-referent sentences and reject positive ones compared to healthy controls. Depressed participants also exhibited an increased LPP to negative stimuli compared to positive or neutral stimuli. Together, these two studies suggest that depression is characterized by relatively increased sensitivity to affective self-relevant stimuli, perhaps in the context of a broader reduction in emotional reactivity to stimuli that are not self-relevant. Thus, depression may be characterized by a more nuanced pattern based on the degree of stimulus self-relevance than either a global decrease or increase in reactivity to affective stimuli.
当前的研究考察了抑郁症患者如何处理情绪和与自我相关的刺激。在两项研究中，抑郁症患者和健康对照组在记录脑电图 (EEG) 数据的同时，阅读自我相关性不同的刺激。我们研究了晚期正电位 (LPP)，这是一种捕捉注意力对动机相关刺激动态分配的 ERP 成分。在研究 1 中，参与者在被动观察任务中阅读单个单词。参与者观看了规范的或自我生成的消极、积极或中性词。探索性分析表明，抑郁症患者仅对自我生成的刺激（包括积极和消极刺激）表现出 LPP 的情感调节，而对规范刺激则没有；健康对照组对自我相关和规范刺激都表现出类似的 LPP 情感调节。在研究 2 中，使用了一个不同的样本和不同的任务，在自我或他人的句子中提供了刺激。与健康对照组相比，抑郁症患者更有可能认同消极的自我参照句子并拒绝积极的句子。与积极或中性刺激相比，抑郁患者的 LPP 对消极刺激的反应也增加了。总之，这两项研究表明，抑郁症的特点是对情感自我相关刺激的敏感性相对增加，也许在对非自我相关刺激的情绪反应减弱的背景下。因此，与对情感刺激的反应要么全局减少要么增加相比，抑郁症的特点可能是基于刺激自我相关性的程度表现出更细微的模式。
