title: Abnormal Neural Basis of Emotional Conflict Control in Treatment-Resistant Depression.
abstract: Emotional conflict has received increased attention as a research topic. The objective of this study is to confirm that the processing of emotional conflict is impaired in treatment-resistant depression (TRD). We compared the event-related potentials of 17 patients with TRD and 17 healthy controls during the face-word Stroop task, which is an effective way of assessing the effects of emotional conflict directly. Compared with healthy controls, the accuracy scores of the TRD patients were lower in both "congruent stimuli" and "incongruent stimuli" conditions, and their response times were longer. The TRD patients also had larger N2 amplitudes over the frontal region, regardless of stimulus condition, which might reflect that TRD patients pay more attention to emotional information. A larger P3 amplitude over the frontal region for "incongruent stimuli minus congruent stimuli" was also found among patients with TRD, which indicates interference effects in the Stroop task. The results of this study provide novel behavioral and neurophysiological evidence of anomalies in cognitive inhibition among patients with TRD using the word-face task. These findings not only improve our understanding of deficient inhibition in TRD, but also pave the way for a cognitive neuropsychiatric model of depression.
authors.affiliation: 1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|2 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Song
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: 1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|3 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Shanshan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: 1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|3 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Xia
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.affiliation: 1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|3 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Jiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Qiu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000928:Antidepressive Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003863:Depression / Q000150:complications / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D000066498:Emotional Adjustment; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D016896:Treatment Outcome
chemical_list: D000928:Antidepressive Agents
keywords: N2; P3; conflict SP; event-related potentials (ERPs); treatment-resistant depression (TRD)