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

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.