Maternal history of depression is associated with enhanced theory of mind in depressed and nondepressed adult women

Theory of Mind in Depressive Disorders: A Review of the Literature

“…Studies using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) [31], which depends mainly on automatic decoding abilities, have yielded controversial results; 3 studies found impaired performance on the RMET in patients in a current episode of unipolar major depression [32,33,34]. In the study by Lee et al [32], only the severely depressed group showed impaired mental state decoding abilities, whereas the RMET performance of the mild/moderately depressed group appeared to be lower than the control group's performance only at a trend level.…”

“…According to the authors' argument, regardless of the level of global depression severity, the presence of specific affective symptoms may indicate a clinical subtype of depression particularly likely to be associated with impaired mental state decoding. Besides the significantly lower performance in the RMET of depressed compared to non-depressed women, Harkness et al [33] found an association between maternal history of depression and better ToM performance across women with and without MDD. Women whose mothers were depressed at a younger age had the highest scores on the RMET; however, this finding was based on a small subsample.…”

“…Despite an increased interest in the research of the topic in recent years, no firm conclusions can be drawn, as the reviewed articles present some conflicting results. Acutely depressed patients were found to be impaired on tasks involving both ToM social-perceptual [32,33,34] and social-cognitive components [44,45,46,47,48]. On the other hand, a number of studies have not reported significant between-group differences between MDD patients and healthy controls [42,53,55,57,58] or found minimal differences [35].…”

“…However, this issue is not well studied, and the concerning results may reflect impairments related to non-ToM abilities, such as verbal fluency [64,65]. In 3 different studies, Harkness et al [68] found three groups of individuals with a high risk of depression, namely dysphorics, individuals with a history of major depression [72], and individuals with a maternal history of depression [33], to show an enhanced accuracy on the RMET. In a further study [70], a small group of mildly depressed individuals was also found to outperform non-depressed individuals on this test.…”

“…Studies investigating the reasoning aspect of ToM in dysphoria are lacking. Apart from Harkness et al [33,68,72], three other groups of researchers investigated ToM after symptom remission in MDD patients, one of which found no significant differences between patients and controls [73], a second one reported on continued but more moderate forms of ToM deficit after symptomatic remission [75], and a third one found that ToM deficits in these patients are associated with higher risk for relapse [74]. In order to get a clearer picture about ToM functioning during the remitted state of major depression, the number of longitudinal studies comparing ToM performance before and after recovery should be increased.…”