Spectral fingerprints of facial affect processing bias in major depression disorder

In major depressive disorder (MDD), processing of facial affect is thought to reflect a perceptual bias (toward negative emotion, away from positive emotion, and interpretation of neutral as emotional). However, it is unclear to what extent and which specific perceptual bias is represented in MDD at the behavior and neuronal level. The present report examined 48 medication naive MDD patients and 41 healthy controls (HCs) performing a facial affect judgment task while magnetoencephalography was recorded. MDD patients were characterized by overall slower response times and lower perceptual judgment accuracies. In comparison with HC, MDD patients exhibited less somatosensory beta activity (20–30 Hz) suppression, more visual gamma activity (40–80 Hz) modulation and somatosensory beta and visual gamma interaction deficit. Moreover, frontal gamma activity during positive facial expression judgment was found to be negatively correlated with depression severity. Present findings suggest that perceptual bias in MDD is associated with distinct spatio-spectral manifestations on the neural level, which potentially establishes aberrant pathways during facial emotion processing and contributes to MDD pathology.