EP 112. Neurophysiological correlates of cognitive control in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD)

Abstract

Affective cognitive control capacity (e.g., the ability to regulate emotions or manipulate emotional material in the service of task goals) is associated with professional and interpersonal success. Impoverished affective control, by contrast, characterizes many neuropsychiatric disorders. Resent studies already showed that patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) for example exhibit an attentional bias, meaning that they had slower reaction time for emotional valent pictures than for neutral pictures (Wolkenstein and Plewnia, 2013)? Our research group moreover discovered that emotional,in contrast to neutral valent pictures lead to an increased LPP (late positive potential) in EEGs of healthy subjects while carrying out a dual working memory task (DWM) (Faehling, 2014)? In our study we want to examine the interaction between emotion regulation,reaction time and working memory performance in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD).Therefore we used negative and neutral IAPS as distractors in a DWM and linked the task with EEG measurement. Our main hypothesis was that the late positive potential (LPP) over the prefrontal? cortex of depressed subjects, measured while watching negative pictures, increased more as in healthy subjects. Accordingly higher LPP amplitudes show higher cognitive capacity load for affective stimuli. This is in line with the discovered correlation between high LPP amplitudes and task accuracy and high LPP amplitudes and reaction time.