Abstract
ObjectiveMajor depressive disorder (MDD) has been characterized by abnormalities in emotional processing. However, what remains unclear is whether MDD also shows deficits in the unconscious processing of either positive or negative emotions. We conducted a psychological study in healthy and MDD subjects to investigate unconscious emotion processing and its valence-specific alterations in MDD patients.MethodsWe combined a well established paradigm for unconscious visual processing, the continuous flash suppression, with positive and negative emotional valences to detect the attentional preference evoked by the invisible emotional facial expressions.ResultsHealthy subjects showed an attentional bias for negative emotions in the unconscious condition while this valence bias remained absent in MDD patients. In contrast, this attentional bias diminished in the conscious condition for both healthy subjects and MDD.ConclusionOur findings demonstrate for the first time valence-specific deficits specifically in the unconscious processing of emotions in MDD; this may have major implications for subsequent neurobiological investigations as well as for clinical diagnosis and therapy.
Highlights
Emotion processing operates on a conscious level as well as in an unconscious mode, with both being associated with different neurobiological pathways [1,2,3]
Recent findings on unconscious emotional processing are inconsistent with regard to the unconscious deficits in major depressive disorder (MDD) patients and it remains unclear whether they are valence-specific
Experiment 1 (800 ms): Healthy subjects No participants were excluded according to the criteria described in Methods
Summary
Emotion processing operates on a conscious level as well as in an unconscious (e.g., implicit and automatic) mode, with both being associated with different neurobiological pathways [1,2,3]. A large body of literature has focused on the conscious aspect of emotion processing as for instance in studies on emotional-cognitive regulation and its abnormalities (e.g., [4,5]). MDD can be characterized by deficits in conscious emotion processing as it is, for instance, required in regulation of especially negative emotions (see [4] for a review). A neuroimaging study [17] did not find any difference in right amygdala in response to backward-masked emotional faces between MDD patients and control subjects. Recent findings on unconscious emotional processing are inconsistent with regard to the unconscious deficits in MDD patients and it remains unclear whether they are valence-specific
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