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Depression and social anxiety are common disorders that have a profound impact on social functioning. The need for studying the neural substrates of social interactions in mental disorders using interactive tasks has been emphasized. The field of neuroeconomics, which combines neuroscience techniques and behavioral economics multiplayer tasks such as the Ultimatum Game (UG), can contribute in this direction. We assessed emotions, behavior, and Event‐Related Potentials in participants with depression and/or social anxiety symptoms (MD/SA, n = 63, 57 females) and healthy controls (n = 72, 67 females), while they played the UG. In this task, participants received fair, mid‐value, and unfair offers from other players. Mixed linear models were implemented to assess trial level changes in neural activity. The MD/SA group reported higher levels of sadness in response to mid‐value and unfair offers compared to controls. In controls, the Medial Frontal Negativity associated with fair offers increased over time, while this dynamic was not observed in the MD/SA group. The MD/SA group showed a decreased P3/LPP in all offers, compared to controls. These results indicate an enhanced negative emotional response to unfairness in the MD/SA group. Neural results reveal a blunted response over time to positive social stimuli in the MD/SA group. Moreover, between‐group differences in P3/LPP may relate to a reduced saliency of offers and/or to a reduced availability of resources for processing incoming stimuli in the MD/SA group. Findings may shed light into the neural substrates of social difficulties in these disorders. It is crucial to study the neural substrates of social interactions in mental health using interactive tasks that immerse the participant in a social context. The Ultimatum Game was used to assess ERPs to fair, mid‐value, and unfair offers from others in depressed and/or socially anxious volunteers. We found blunted neural responses over time to fair offers as well as reduced availability of resources for processing incoming social stimuli in depression and social anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewards play an important role in people's well‐being. However, the mechanisms underlying neural habituation to hedonic rewards (attainment of pleasure) and eudaimonic rewards (attainment of meaning and self‐realization) and their implications for longitudinal changes in well‐being remain unknown. By operationalizing hedonic rewards as "winning money for oneself" and eudaimonic rewards as "winning money for a charity", 78 participants (41 women, aged from 17 to 24 years) completed a revised monetary gambling task during event‐related potential (ERP) recording. Subsequently, the participants' well‐being was measured after one year. The results showed that the reward positivity (RewP) effect readily decreased as the hedonic rewards were repeated, whereas the RewP effect in response to eudaimonic rewards was relatively sustained over time. Moreover, the declining RewP effect for repeated eudaimonic rewards was marginally positively associated with longitudinal decreases in well‐being. These findings demonstrate at the neural level that sensitivity to repeated hedonic rewards is more prone to decrease than sensitivity to repeated eudaimonic rewards, and sustained eudaimonic reward sensitivity in the short term has greater implications for changes in well‐being in the long term. The contents of this page will be shown on the eTOC on the online version only. It will not be published as part of the article PDF. Although past work has provided some knowledge of the neural distinctions between hedonic reward and eudaimonic reward processing, our work focuses on the neural habituation of hedonic and eudaimonic reward processing. We found that neural sensitivity to repeated hedonic rewards is more prone to decrease than sensitivity to repeated eudaimonic rewards, and sustained eudaimonic reward sensitivity in the short term has greater implications for changes in well‐being in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youths at high risk for depression have been shown to have problems in repairing their own sad mood. Given that sympathetic arousal has been implicated both in the experience and regulation of affect, an atypical pattern of arousal may be one of the factors that contribute to mood repair problems. In the current study, we measured sympathetic arousal of never‐depressed youths at high (n = 56) and low (n = 67) familial risk for depression during sad mood induction and instructed mood repair. Sympathetic arousal was indexed by skin conductance level (SCL) and cardiac pre‐ejection period (PEP); mood repair outcome was indexed by self‐rated affect. High‐risk youths demonstrated increased SCL during sadness induction, which persisted during mood repair; low‐risk youths evidenced increased SCL only during mood repair. Shortened PEP was evident only among high‐risk youths and only during mood repair. Furthermore, shortened PEP during mood induction predicted less successful mood repair in the low‐risk but not in the high‐risk group. The findings suggest that: (a) depression‐prone youths differ from control peers in patterns of sympathetic responses to emotional stimuli, which may impair their ability to relieve sadness, and (b) activation patterns differ across subsystems (SCL vs. PEP) of sympathetic activity, in conjunction with depression risk status. Difficulties in attenuating sadness (i.e., mood repair deficits) appear to be risk factors for depression. It is, therefore, important to understand better how physiological processes facilitate or hinder successful mood repair. In the present study, never‐depressed youths at high familial risk for depression and low‐risk control youths differed in sympathetic activation during sadness processing; sympathetic activation may, therefore, play a role in mood repair deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that reward anticipation decreases individuals' acute stress responses. However, individuals who have experienced early life stress (ELS) may have a blunted capacity for reward anticipation, which reduces its buffering effect on psychosocial stress responses. To investigate this phenomenon, 66 young adults completed the Trier Social Stress Test following a reward anticipation task, and their ELS levels were measured using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Meanwhile, the current study collected biological and psychological measures of stress by analysing cortisol levels, heart rates, heart rate variability (HRV) as well as subjective stress levels, in response to the Trier Social Stress test. Results showed that reward anticipation successfully decreased acute stress responses in general, and it also improved participants' HRV. However, this effect was more evident in individuals with low ELS than those with high ELS. These findings help us deepen understanding of the role of reward anticipation in fostering resilience under stress and the potentially important implications for individuals who have been exposed to ELS are also discussed., (© 2021 Society for Psychophysiological Research.)

There have been few direct examinations of the volitional control of emotional responses to provocative stimuli in PTSD. To address this gap, an emotion regulation task was administered to 27 Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veterans and 23 healthy controls. Neutral and aversive photographs were presented to participants who did or did not employ emotion regulation strategies. Objective indices included corrugator electromyogram, the late positive potential, and the electrocardiogram. On uninstructed trials, participants with PTSD exhibited blunted cardiac reactivity rather than the exaggerated cardioacceleratory responses seen in trauma cue reactivity studies. On interleaved regulation trials, no measure evidenced group differences in voluntary emotion regulation. Persons with PTSD may not differ from normals in their capacity to voluntarily regulate normative emotional responses to provocative stimuli in the laboratory, though they may nevertheless respond differentially on uninstructed trials and endorse symptoms of dyscontrol pathognomonic of the disorder outside of the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marital stress is associated with a higher incidence of psychiatric disorders, in particular major depression. One pathway through which marital stress may impact emotional health is by compromising emotion-responding processes. We examined a longitudinal sample of adults ( N = 116; 59 males; 39-84 years) to verify how marital stress predicts reactivity to, and recovery from, emotional provocation. Individuals watched positive, neutral, and negative pictures while an objective measure of affective state, corrugator supercilii muscle activity, was recorded continuously. Our results indicate that marital stress is associated with short-lived responses to positive pictures, indexed by a less persistent decrease in corrugator activity after picture offset. Extending beyond the prior focus on negative emotional processes, these results suggest that social stress may impact health by influencing the time course of responding to positive events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous EEG studies have shown that depression is associated with abnormal functional asymmetries in frontal cortex, fMRI and PET studies have largely failed to identify specific brain areas showing this effect. The present study tested the hypothesis that emotion processes are related to asymmetric patterns of fMRI activity, particularly within dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Eleven depressed and 18 control participants identified the color in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were printed. Both groups showed a leftward lateralization for pleasant words in DLPFC. In a neighboring DLPFC area, the depression group showed more right-lateralized activation than controls, replicating EEG findings. These data confirm that emotional stimulus processing and trait depression are associated with asymmetric brain functions in distinct subregions of the DLPFC that may go undetected unless appropriate analytic procedures are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression is characterized by altered sensitivity to rewards, with recent evidence suggesting that the ability to sustain responses to rewards across long experimental tasks is diminished. Most work on sustained reward responsiveness has taken a categorical approach and focused on major depressive disorder. However, impairments in reward sensitivity are also found at lower levels of symptom severity and may be relevant for understanding basic mechanisms linking reward processing abnormalities to depression. The current study took a dimensional approach to examine the relation between depression symptoms and sustained reward responsiveness by examining how early neural responses to rewards and losses change over a short time course (i.e., during the experiment). In a sample of 45 unselected undergraduates, changes in the amplitude of the reward positivity (RewP) and feedback negativity (FN) were examined over the course of a simple gambling task using multilevel modeling. Amplitude of the RewP was sustained and amplitude of the FN increased during the task. Unlike prior work focused on clinical populations, depression symptoms in this unselected sample were associated with enhanced RewP and FN responding over the course of the task. Results echo prior work that underscores the importance of examining changes in response to reward across trials and further suggests that sustained responses to both rewards and losses vary in relation to symptom level. Depression is characterized by altered sensitivity to rewards and losses; however, most previous research has focused on clinical depression only. This study took a dimensional approach to examine how within‐task changes to early neural responses to reward (RewP) and loss (FN) feedback vary in relation to depression symptoms in an unselected sample of young adults. Multilevel modeling analysis revealed that greater depression symptoms were associated with enhanced responses to both rewards and losses over the course of the experiment. These results suggest that patterns of sustained neural responding differ depending on the range and distribution of depression symptoms examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]