Social comparison affect emotional processing in subthreshold depression: evidence from an ERP study.

Subthreshold depression can effectively and timely carry out early identification, prevention of major depressive disorder(MDD). Social comparison affects emotion, yet the neural mechanisms in subthreshold depression is unclear. We employed event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the effect of facial emotion recognition under social comparison in subthreshold depression. The results indicated that there was an interaction between social comparison and emotional processing of P300, LPC in the two groups, both positive and negative emotions were affected by the worse off than some, better off than many. The amplitude of N1 was smaller under positive emotion condition in the subthreshold depression group, suggesting that the subthreshold depression group did not allocate more attentional resources to visual stimuli in the early stage. These results advance our understanding of the effect of social comparison on emotion processing and contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and maintain subthreshold depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]