A Review of the Role of Social Cognition in Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

Background: Social cognition – the ability to identify, perceive, and interpret socially relevant information – is an important skill that plays a significant role in successful interpersonal functioning. Social cognitive performance is recognized to be impaired in several psychiatric conditions, but the relationship with major depressive disorder is less well understood. The aim of this review is to characterize the current understanding of: (i) the different domains of social cognition and a possible relationship with major depressive disorder, (ii) the clinical presentation of social cognition in acute and remitted depressive states, and (iii) the effect of severity of depression on social cognitive performance.Methods: Electronic databases were searched to identify clinical studies investigating social cognition in a major depressive disorder population, yielding 31 studies for this review.Results: Patients with major depressive disorder appear to interpret social cognitive stimuli differently to healthy controls: depressed individuals may interpret emotion through a mood-congruent bias and have difficulty with cognitive theory of mind tasks requiring interpretation of complex mental states. Social cognitive performance appears to be inversely associated with severity of depression, whilst the bias toward negative emotions persists even in remission. Some deficits may normalize following effective pharmacotherapy.Conclusions: The difficulties with social interaction observed in major depressive disorder may, at least in part, be due to an altered ability to correctly interpret emotional stimuli and mental states. These features seem to persist even in remission, although some may respond to intervention. Further research is required in this area to better understand the functional impact of these findings and the way in which targeted therapy could aid depressed individuals with social interactions.

Interpersonal perception as a mediator of the depression–interpersonal difficulties link: A review

“…This method usually includes tasks in which participants view short video vignettes depicting interactions between actors, and are asked to answer a set of questions regarding these interactions to which there is a correct or incorrect response (e.g., the Awareness of Social Inference Test; McDonald, Flanagan, Rollins, & Kinch, 2003). Studies using this type of tasks have usually found individuals with clinical depression to have impaired MSAS functioning (e.g., Ladegaard et al, 2014;Wolkenstein et al, 2011; for a review see Schreiter et al, 2013;Weightman et al, 2014). The same has been found for individuals with elevated depressive symptoms (e.g., Ambady & Gray, 2002).…”

“…In contrast to the large number of studies of depression and the ESS, only few have focused on depression and the MSAS (Ladegaard, Larsen, Videbech, & Lysaker, 2014;Weightman, Air, & Baune, 2014). Like the ESS, MSAS functioning has been assessed in several ways.…”

Freezing of gait and affective theory of mind in Parkinson disease

“…The ability to infer emotional mental states of others appears then to be linked with the effective use of emotions for appropriate personal judgment in decision-making with possible consequence in social wellbeing. Further, an altered ability to correctly interpret emotional states might be responsible of difficulties with social interaction, as observed in major depressive disorder [35], and this issue deserves to be explored in future studies. Finally, it might be object of future studies to evaluate potential benefit of a rehabilitative approach combining motor, cognitive and social training paradigms in FOG.…”

Depression moderates the associations between beliefs about medicines and medication adherence in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: Cross-sectional study

“…The presence of depression can alter the course of RA negatively via cognitive-behavioural or inflammatory pathways: patients with concurrent depression suffer from more pain, show a heightened disease activity (Rathbun et al, 2013) as well as generally poorer health outcomes (Morris et al, 2011). Some specific characteristics of people suffering from depression, such as negatively biased (social) cognitions or motivational deficits, can affect behaviours and the way in which cognitions shape behaviours (Weightman et al, 2014;Wisco and NolenHoeksema, 2010). This suggests consequences for adherence behaviours: DiMatteo et al (2000) analysed the relationship between depression and adherence to various treatment regimes and found depression to contribute to medication non-adherence among patients with different medical conditions.…”