Depressive states in healthy individuals lead to biased processing on frontal-parietal ERPs

Abstract

According to Beck’s cognitive model of depression, depression has an effect on schema, which leads to biased cognition. Depressive states and depression symptoms are considered to occur on a continuum, with only qualitative differences between them. However, it remains unclear whether there are significant differences in information processing among healthy individuals. In this study, we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectrum perturbation (ERSP) of healthy individuals with various depressive states during emotional stimulation. We found that participants in a high depressive state had a lower P300 amplitude. Moreover, we identified significant differences in fast and slow neural responses in the frontal and parietal lobes, which might indicate a cognitive bias in healthy individuals.