Depressive states in healthy subjects lead to biased processing in frontal-parietal ERPs during emotional stimuli

Abstract

Subthreshold depressive (sD) states and major depression are considered to occur on a continuum, and there are only quantitative and not qualitative differences between depressive states in healthy individuals and patients with depression. sD is showing a progressively increasing prevalence and has a lifelong impact, and the social and clinical impacts of sD are no less than those of major depressive disorder (MDD). Because depression leads to biased cognition, patients with depression and healthy individuals show different visual processing properties. However, it remains unclear whether there are significant differences in visual information recognition among healthy individuals with various depressive states. In this study, we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectrum perturbation (ERSP) of healthy individuals with various depressive states during the perception of emotional visual stimulation. We show that different neural activities can be detected even among healthy individuals. We divided healthy participants into high, middle, and low depressive state groups and found that participants in a high depressive state had a lower P300 amplitude and significant differences in fast and slow neural responses in the frontal and parietal lobes. We anticipate our study to provide useful parameters for assessing the evaluation of depressive states in healthy individuals.