title: Altered negative unconscious processing in major depressive disorder: an exploratory neuropsychological study.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been characterized by abnormalities in emotional processing. However, what remains unclear is whether MDD also shows deficits in the unconscious processing of either positive or negative emotions. We conducted a psychological study in healthy and MDD subjects to investigate unconscious emotion processing and its valence-specific alterations in MDD patients.
  
  
  METHODS
  We combined a well established paradigm for unconscious visual processing, the continuous flash suppression, with positive and negative emotional valences to detect the attentional preference evoked by the invisible emotional facial expressions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Healthy subjects showed an attentional bias for negative emotions in the unconscious condition while this valence bias remained absent in MDD patients. In contrast, this attentional bias diminished in the conscious condition for both healthy subjects and MDD.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings demonstrate for the first time valence-specific deficits specifically in the unconscious processing of emotions in MDD; this may have major implications for subsequent neurobiological investigations as well as for clinical diagnosis and therapy.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Zhi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Jinping
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Chunbo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Jijun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xuchu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Weng
authors.forename: Georg
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Northoff
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult