Depression and event-related potentials: emotional disengagement and reward insensitivity

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide economical neural indices of information-processing abnormalities in relation to depression and depression risk. Early ERP studies of depression focused on cognitive deficits, more recent studies have examined ERPs to emotionally and motivationally relevant stimuli. Both the late positive potential (LPP), a measure of sustained processing of motivationally salient stimuli, and the reward positivity (RewP), an index of reactivity to receipt of reward, appear to be diminished in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and depressive symptoms, suggesting that depression is associated with emotional disengagement and deficits in reward processing.