A Double Dissociation of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortical Responses to Sad and Happy Stimuli in Depressed and Healthy Individuals

doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.04.035

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 58, Issue 6, 15 September 2005, Pages 495-503

This study was presented, in part, at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry; May 15, 2003, San Francisco, California.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.04.035 Get rights and content

Background

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is a region implicated in the assessment of the rewarding potential of stimuli and may be dysfunctional in major depressive disorder (MDD). The few studies examining prefrontal cortical responses to emotive stimuli in MDD have indicated increased VMPFC responses to pleasant images but decreased responses to sad mood provocation when compared with healthy individuals. We wished to corroborate these results by examining neural responses to personally relevant happy and sad stimuli in MDD and healthy individuals within the same paradigm.

Methods

Neural responses to happy and sad emotional stimuli (autobiographical memory prompts and congruent facial expressions) were measured using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in MDD (n = 12) and healthy (n = 12) individuals.

Results

Increased and decreased responses in VMPFC were observed in MDD and healthy individuals, respectively, to happy stimuli, whereas the pattern was reversed for MDD and healthy individual responses to sad stimuli. These findings were not explained by medication effects in depressed individuals.

Conclusions

These findings indicate a double dissociation of the pattern of VMPFC response to happy and sad stimuli in depressed and healthy individuals and suggest abnormal reward processing in MDD.

Section snippets

Participants

Twelve ICD-10 diagnosed individuals with MDD were recruited from the inpatient and outpatient departments of the Maudsley Hospital, London. Twelve healthy individuals without previous history of psychiatric illness and scores <8 on both the General Hospital Questionnaire (GHQ) (Goldberg 1972) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck et al 1961) were recruited from the community and from ancillary staff and students of the Institute of Psychiatry, London. Exclusion criteria included cognitive

Subjective Mood Ratings

Subjective mood ratings were significantly increased during the mood conditions when compared with the neutral conditions across all individuals (F = 175, p < .001, df = 1, 22). The mean change was −3.0 points, SD −1.3, for sad and +3.3 points, SD +1.7, for happy. Depressed individuals reported that they were surprised by just how emotionally affected they had been by the emotional, in particular the sad, stimuli in contrast to the neutral stimuli. There was, however, no significant effect of

Discussion

We employed a novel paradigm to compare VMPFC function in depressed and healthy individuals in response to positively and negatively valenced stimuli, specifically exploring the role of VMPFC as assessor of the rewarding potential of such stimuli. The main finding was of a double dissociation of response to the different stimuli in the two groups, supporting our predictions, and consistent, at least in part, with previous dynamic studies examining responses to positive and negative stimuli in

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Original articleA Double Dissociation of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortical Responses to Sad and Happy Stimuli in Depressed and Healthy Individuals

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Section snippets

Participants

Subjective Mood Ratings

Discussion

Magn Reson Imaging

Physica D

Trends Cogn Sci

Biol Psychiatry

Biol Psychiatry

Neuroimage

Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging

Biol Psychiatry

Biol Psychiatry

Neuron

Biol Psychiatry

Psychiatry Res

Neuron

Biol Psychiatry

Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex

Cereb Cortex

DepressionClinical, Experimental and Theoretical Aspects

An inventory for measuring depression

Arch Gen Psychiatry

The Social Origins of Depression

Coloured noise and computational inference in neurophysiological (fMRI) time series analysisResampling methods in time and wavelet domains

Hum Brain Mapp

Global, voxel and cluster tests, by theory and permutation, for a difference between two groups of structural MR images of the brain

IEEE Trans Med Imaging

On the Self-Regulation of Behaviour

Diurnal variation in clinical depression and accessibility of memories of positive and negative experiences

J Abnorm Psychol

Neural activity relating to generation and representation of galvanic skin conductance responsesA functional magnetic resonance imaging study

J Neurosci

Pictures of Facial Affect

Original article
A Double Dissociation of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortical Responses to Sad and Happy Stimuli in Depressed and Healthy Individuals