Ambiguity Processing Bias Induced by Depressed Mood Is Associated with Diminished Pleasantness

Abstract

Depressed individuals are biased to perceive, interpret, and judge ambiguous cues in a negative/pessimistic manner. Depressed mood can induce and exacerbate these biases, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. We theorize that depressed mood can bias ambiguity processing by altering one’s subjective emotional feelings (e.g. pleasantness/unpleasantness) of the cues. This is because when there is limited objective information, individuals often rely on subjective feelings as a source of information for cognitive processing. To test this theory, three groups (induced depression vs. spontaneous depression vs. neutral) were tested in the Judgement Bias Task (JBT), a behavioral assay of ambiguity processing bias. Subjective pleasantness/unpleasantness of cues was measured by facial electromyography (EMG) from the zygomaticus major (ZM, “smiling”) and from the corrugator supercilii (CS, “frowning”) muscles. As predicted, induced sad mood (vs. neutral mood) yielded a negative bias with a magnitude comparable to that in a spontaneous depressed mood. The facial EMG data indicates that the negative judgement bias induced by depressed mood was associated with a decrease in ZM reactivity (i.e., diminished perceived pleasantness of cues). Our results suggest that depressed mood may bias ambiguity processing by affecting the reward system.

Brain–heart dynamics during emotional processing under uncertain conditions: An index of depression risk

“…Attentional bias for negative events might be notable characteristics of both MDD and subclinical depression (Lin et al, 2019). Thus, our findings of altered HEP in HDR individuals may highlight their negative bias in predictive coding processing.…”

“…During the heartbeat counting task, HEPs reflected the precision-weighted prediction error for each heartbeat (Banellis and Cruse, 2020). Moreover, attentional bias for negative events might be notable characteristics of individuals with MDD (Gotlib and Joormann, 2010) and with subclinical depression (Lin et al, 2019). It has been shown that depressive trait may relate to reduced precision in prediction and increased precision in prediction error (Badcock et al, 2017).…”

“…Our mediation analysis results suggested that prestimulus cardiac interoceptive processing affected poststimulus cardiac activity in response to negatively valenced stimuli and further showed that the interaction was mediated by BDI scores. Attentional bias toward negative events is a notable characteristic of individuals with MDD (75) or subclinical depression (76). Therefore, our findings suggest that individuals with high BDI scores exhibited altered autonomic cardiac functions and cardiac interoception, as reflected by neural and physiological cardiac responses to unpleasant stimuli.…”

Depressive symptoms in youth with ADHD: the role of impairments in cognitive emotion regulation

“…The implicit measure of cognitive bias implemented in this study has originally been developed in the context of animal models of depression [77][78][79] and translated for human research [80][81][82][83]. Previous studies in humans have consistently reported an association between a more negative interpretation bias and elevated levels of depressiveness as well as experimentally induced depressive mood in general population samples [80][81][82][83].…”

“…The ambiguous cue-conditioning paradigm is an indirect measure of cognitive bias based on evaluative conditioning. The paradigm has been developed in animal studies [77][78][79] and translated for human research [80][81][82][83]. In the current study, we implemented a visual version of the task (Fig.…”