Publication
Associations of negative affective biases and depressive symptoms in a community-based sample
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date:
21-09-2022
DOI:
10.1017/S0033291722002720
Abstract: Major depressive disorder (MDD) was previously associated with negative affective biases. Evidence from larger population-based studies, however, is lacking, including whether biases normalise with remission. We investigated associations between affective bias measures and depressive symptom severity across a large community-based s le, followed by examining differences between remitted in iduals and controls. Participants from Generation Scotland ( N = 1109) completed the: (i) Bristol Emotion Recognition Task (BERT), (ii) Face Affective Go/No-go (FAGN), and (iii) Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT). In iduals were classified as MDD-current ( n = 43), MDD-remitted ( n = 282), or controls ( n = 784). Analyses included using affective bias summary measures (primary analyses), followed by detailed emotion/condition analyses of BERT and FAGN (secondary analyses). For summary measures, the only significant finding was an association between greater symptoms and lower risk adjustment for CGT across the s le (in iduals with greater symptoms were less likely to bet more, despite increasingly favourable conditions). This was no longer significant when controlling for non-affective cognition. No differences were found for remitted-MDD v. controls. Detailed analysis of BERT and FAGN indicated subtle negative biases across multiple measures of affective cognition with increasing symptom severity, that were independent of non-effective cognition [e.g. greater tendency to rate faces as angry (BERT), and lower accuracy for happy/neutral conditions (FAGN)]. Results for remitted-MDD were inconsistent. This suggests the presence of subtle negative affective biases at the level of emotion/condition in association with depressive symptoms across the s le, over and above those accounted for by non-affective cognition, with no evidence for affective biases in remitted in iduals.