Event‐related potentials during the ultimatum game in people with symptoms of depression and/or social anxiety

Abstract

Depression and social anxiety are common disorders that have a profound impact on social functioning. The need for studying the neural substrates of social interactions in mental disorders using interactive tasks has been emphasized. The field of neuroeconomics, which combines neuroscience techniques and behavioral economics multiplayer tasks such as the Ultimatum Game (UG), can contribute in this direction. We assessed emotions, behavior, and Event-Related Potentials in participants with depression and/or social anxiety symptoms (MD/SA, n = 63, 57 females) and healthy controls (n = 72, 67 females), while they played the UG.F I G U R E 1 Ultimatum Game. (a) In each trial, the participant was presented with a silhouette representing the proposer allocated to the trial. Subsequently, the participant was presented with the offer made by this proposer. After 1500 ms from the start of the offer screen, the buttons appeared, and the participant was allowed to respond by pressing the "YES" (in Spanish, "SI") or "NO" button. Once the button was pressed, it turned yellow. Event-Related Potentials were measured locked to offer presentation. (b) Mean rejections (number of offers rejected) and (c) mean reaction times to offers. Error bars depict one standard error of the mean.

Evaluating the effectiveness of artifact correction and rejection in event‐related potential research

“…The present study examines the effectiveness of a common approach to dealing with eyeblinks and other artifacts that produce extreme values, in which artifacts with stable scalp distributions are corrected using independent component analysis (ICA; Chaumon et al, 2015;Jung, Makeig, Humphries, et al, 2000;Jung, Makeig, Westerfield, et al, 2000) and any trials that have extreme voltage deflections in any channel in the corrected data are also excluded from the averaged ERPs (artifact rejection; Islam et al, 2016;Nolan et al, 2010). This general approach is used very widely: in the first 10 issues of the 2023 volume of Psychophysiology, there were at least 18 papers that used some variant of this general approach (see Addante et al, 2023;Arnau et al, 2023;Bruchmann et al, 2023;Chen & Chen, 2023;Fan et al, 2023;Hubbard et al, 2023;Lin et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2023;Morales et al, 2023;Nguyen et al, 2023;Nicolaisen-Sobesky et al, 2023;Paraskevoudi & SanMiguel, 2023;Ringer et al, 2023;Schmuck et al, 2023;Sun et al, 2023;Tao et al, 2023;Wood et al, 2023;Zheng et al, 2023).…”