Abstract
Alterations in the processing of emotional stimuli (e.g., facial expressions, prosody, music) have repeatedly been reported in patients with major depression. Such impairments may result from the likewise prevalent executive deficits in these patients. However, studies investigating this relationship are rare. Moreover, most studies to date have only assessed impairments in unimodal emotional processing, whereas in real life, emotions are primarily conveyed through more than just one sensory channel. The current study therefore aimed at investigating multi-modal emotional processing in patients with depression and to assess the relationship between emotional and neurocognitive impairments. Fourty one patients suffering from major depression and 41 never-depressed healthy controls participated in an audiovisual (faces-sounds) emotional integration paradigm as well as a neurocognitive test battery. Our results showed that depressed patients were specifically impaired in the processing of positive auditory stimuli as they rated faces significantly more fearful when presented with happy than with neutral sounds. Such an effect was absent in controls. Findings in emotional processing in patients did not correlate with Beck’s depression inventory score. Furthermore, neurocognitive findings revealed significant group differences for two of the tests. The effects found in audiovisual emotional processing, however, did not correlate with performance in the neurocognitive tests. In summary, our results underline the diversity of impairments going along with depression and indicate that deficits found for unimodal emotional processing cannot trivially be generalized to deficits in a multi-modal setting. The mechanisms of impairments therefore might be far more complex than previously thought. Our findings furthermore contradict the assumption that emotional processing deficits in major depression are associated with impaired attention or inhibitory functioning.
Highlights
Major depression is a psychiatric disorder that is thought to represent one of the leading causes of disability worldwide (Ferrari et al, 2013)
Despite the fact that patients with depression were impaired both in audiovisual emotional processing and neurocognitive performance, we found no significant correlations between these two fields
SUMMARY Our findings suggest that audiovisual integration of especially happy sounds is altered in patients with depression and that these alterations cannot be related directly to impairments in cognitive skills
Summary
Major depression is a psychiatric disorder that is thought to represent one of the leading causes of disability worldwide (Ferrari et al, 2013). The disorder goes along with a range of symptoms including on the one hand emotional and social problems like low mood and loss of self-esteem as well as on the other hand cognitive impairments like poor concentration and indecisiveness (WHO, 2010) With regard to the former symptoms several theories have been postulated in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of these social and emotional problems in depression. The most influential theory suggests a negative bias for emotional and neutral material, manifesting, for example, as more negative ratings of facial expressions or selective attention on negative stimuli This has been supported by numerous studies (Gur et al, 1992; Bouhuys et al, 1999; Leppänen et al, 2004) reporting either a general negative bias or a bias for neutral or ambiguous stimuli. Loi et al (2013) only found labeling problems for happy body language depicted by photographs of body postures as well as frozen movie scenes and short clips of “Point-Light Walkers.” Schlipf et al (2013) report a negative bias in reference to judgments of neutral semantics, patients rated positive semantics and positive prosody as less positive than healthy controls, indicating an absence of a positive bias in the patient group
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
