title: Abnormal prefrontal activity subserving attentional control of emotion in remitted depressed patients during a working memory task with emotional distracters.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) show deficits in processing of facial emotions that persist beyond recovery and cessation of treatment. Abnormalities in neural areas supporting attentional control and emotion processing in remitted depressed (rMDD) patients suggests that there may be enduring, trait-like abnormalities in key neural circuits at the interface of cognition and emotion, but this issue has not been studied systematically.
  
  
  METHODS
  Nineteen euthymic, medication-free rMDD patients (mean age 33.6 years; mean duration of illness 34 months) and 20 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC; mean age 35.8 years) performed the Emotional Face N-Back (EFNBACK) task, a working memory task with emotional distracter stimuli. We used blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural activity in the dorsolateral (DLPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventral striatum and amygdala, using a region of interest (ROI) approach in SPM2.
  
  
  RESULTS
  rMDD patients exhibited significantly greater activity relative to HC in the left DLPFC [Brodmann area (BA) 9/46] in response to negative emotional distracters during high working memory load. By contrast, rMDD patients exhibited significantly lower activity in the right DLPFC and left VLPFC compared to HC in response to positive emotional distracters during high working memory load. These effects occurred during accurate task performance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Remitted depressed patients may continue to exhibit attentional biases toward negative emotional information, reflected by greater recruitment of prefrontal regions implicated in attentional control in the context of negative emotional information.
authors: Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA. Rebecca.Kerestes@monash.edu
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Kerestes
authors: C D
authors: CD
authors: Ladouceur
authors: S
authors: S
authors: Meda
authors: P J
authors: PJ
authors: Nathan
authors: H P
authors: HP
authors: Blumberg
authors: K
authors: K
authors: Maloney
authors: B
authors: B
authors: Ruf
authors: A
authors: A
authors: Saricicek
authors: G D
authors: GD
authors: Pearlson
authors: Z
authors: Z
authors: Bhagwagar
authors: M L
authors: ML
authors: Phillips
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001479:Basal Ganglia / Q000503:physiopathology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D012044:Regression Analysis
chemical_list: D010100:Oxygen