Infants of Depressed and Nondepressed Mothers Exhibit Differences in Frontal Brain Electrical Activity during the Expression of Negative Emotions.

Examined electrical brain activity during negative and positive emotion expression in infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Found that, compared with infants of nondepressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers exhibited increased EEG activation in the frontal but not parietal region when expressing negative emotions. There were no reliable differences in brain activation during positive or neutral emotion expression. (Author/KB)