Biomedical subjects

Ian H Gotlib

Publications and source records attributed to Ian H Gotlib.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Amygdala activation in the processing of neutral faces in social anxiety disorder: is neutral really neutral?

Previous research has suggested that Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is associated with a tendency to interpret ambiguous social stimuli in a threatening manner. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patterns of neural activation in response to the processing of neutral facial expressions in individuals diagnosed with SAD and healthy controls (CTLs). The SAD participants exhibited a different pattern of amygdala activation in response to neutral faces than did the CTL participants, suggesting a neural basis for the biased processing of ambiguous social information in SAD individuals.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Amygdala reactivity and mood-congruent memory in individuals at risk for depressive relapse.

BACKGROUND: According to cognitive diathesis-stress theories, a latent cognitive vulnerability to depression is activated by negative affect in individuals at risk for depressive relapse. This vulnerability can manifest as mood-congruent memory during sad mood and may involve amygdala response, which is implicated in memory for emotionally arousing stimuli. This study examined whether amygdala modulates memory for negatively valenced words before and after a sad mood induction in healthy individuals with and without a history of recurrent major depression. METHODS: Fourteen unmedicated remitted depressed (RD) and 14 matched never depressed (ND) individuals were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a self-referent encoding/evaluation task (SRET) preceding and following a sad mood challenge. After each SRET, participants' free recall was assessed. RESULTS: Following sad mood induction, bilateral amygdala response during encoding of valenced words predicted increased recall of negative self-referent words for a subset of RD participants. This association was not present before the sad mood induction and was not evident in individuals without a history of depression, regardless of mood state. CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with cognitive diathesis-stress theories and suggest a role for the amygdala in modulating mood-congruent memory during transient sad mood in individuals who are vulnerable to depression relapse.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Adaptive and maladaptive components of rumination? Diagnostic specificity and relation to depressive biases.

The present study investigated the validity of the two-factor solution of items selected from the Rumination Scale of the Response Style Questionnaire proposed by Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema (2003). In the first part of this study we used samples of currently depressed (MDD), formerly depressed (FD), socially anxious (SP), and healthy control participants to examine whether the brooding and reflective pondering components differentiate participants with an anxiety disorder from participants with depression. In the second part of this study we examined whether these components of rumination were differentially related to cognitive biases in depression. Overall, the MDD group exhibited higher brooding scores than did all other groups; SP and FD groups did not differ from each other but obtained higher brooding scores than did the control participants. Only the MDD and the control groups differed on the reflective pondering factor. Importantly, brooding and reflective pondering were differentially related to cognitive biases. Specifically, the correlation between brooding/reflective pondering and memory bias was not significant when depressive symptoms were partialed out. The correlation between brooding and attentional bias for sad faces, however, remained significant even when current depressive symptoms were taken into account. In sum, our results support the formulation that rumination is composed of an adaptive reflective pondering factor and a maladaptive brooding factor.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Is this happiness I see? Biases in the identification of emotional facial expressions in depression and social phobia.

The present study was designed to examine the operation of depression-specific biases in the identification or labeling of facial expression of emotions. Participants diagnosed with major depression and social phobia and control participants were presented with faces that expressed increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. The authors assessed individual differences in the intensity of facial expression of emotion that was required for the participants to accurately identify the emotion being expressed. The depressed participants required significantly greater intensity of emotion than did the social phobic and the control participants to correctly identify happy expressions and less intensity to identify sad than angry expressions. In contrast, social phobic participants needed less intensity to correctly identify the angry expressions than did the depressed and control participants and less intensity to identify angry than sad expressions. Implications of these results for interpersonal functioning in depression and social phobia are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Subgenual anterior cingulate activation to valenced emotional stimuli in major depression.

Major depression has been associated with anomalous activation in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, but its response to emotional stimuli is poorly understood. The primary goal of this study was to compare levels of activation in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex of diagnosed depressed and nondepressed participants in response to happy and sad facial expressions of affect. Whereas cognitive theories of depression predict increased activation to negative stimuli, depressed participants were found to exhibit increased activation to both types of stimuli in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. Importantly, the loci were in different regions of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that there is functional specialization in the processing of negatively and positively valenced stimuli.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Amygdala reactivity to emotional faces predicts improvement in major depression.

Behavioral studies suggest that emotional reactivity in depressed persons predicts subsequent symptom reduction. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a prospective study, we show that greater amygdala activation to emotional facial expressions among depressed patients predicts symptom reduction 8 months later, controlling for initial depression severity and medication status. Functional magnetic resonance imaging may thus be used as a method to identify neural markers in depressed patients at risk for poor outcome.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Emotion context insensitivity in major depressive disorder.

The present study tested 3 competing views of how depression alters emotional reactivity: positive attenuation (reduced positive), negative potentiation (increased negative), and emotion context insensitivity (ECI; reduced positive and negative). Normative and idiographic stimuli that elicited happy, sad, and neutral states were presented to currently depressed, formerly depressed, and healthy control individuals while experiential, behavioral, and autonomic responses were measured. Currently depressed individuals reported less sadness reactivity and less happiness experience across all conditions than did the other participants, and they exhibited a more dysphoric response to idiographic than to normative stimuli. Overall, data provide partial support for the positive attenuation and ECI views. Depression may produce mood-state-dependent changes in emotional reactivity that are most pronounced in emotion experience reports.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Remembering the good, forgetting the bad: intentional forgetting of emotional material in depression.

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Emotional intensity of idiographic sad memories in depression predicts symptom levels 1 year later.

When cued with generic happy and sad words, depressed individuals have been found to articulate contextually impoverished memories of autobiographical events. Although this pattern predicts a worse symptomatic course of disorder in some depressed samples, longitudinal findings with the cue-word paradigm are inconsistent. To address the etiological significance of autobiographical memories outside the cue-word paradigm, the authors used an idiographic interview in which depressed participants generated memories of their happiest and saddest lifetime events. Each memory was coded for detail and emotional intensity. At a 1-year follow-up, participants' levels of depressive symptoms were reassessed. Lower emotional intensity of saddest memories predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms at follow-up. Several implications for understanding sadness and emotional disclosure in depression are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Attention and memory biases in the offspring of parents with bipolar disorder: indications from a pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Although children of bipolar parents are at heightened risk for developing emotional disorders, the processes underlying this vulnerability are not well understood. This study examined biases in the processing of emotional stimuli as a potential vulnerability marker of bipolar disorder. METHODS: Sixteen children of bipolar parents who did not show any indication of having an emotional disorder at the time of testing and ten children of never-disordered control parents underwent a negative mood induction designed to activate cognitive schemas and were then administered an emotion Stroop task and a self-referent encoding task. RESULTS: Children of bipolar parents were found to exhibit an attentional bias towards social-threat and manic-irritable words. Furthermore, although high- and low-risk children did not differ in their endorsement of positive and negative words as self-descriptive, the high-risk children demonstrated better recall of negative words than did the low-risk children. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, children without a mood disorder who are at high risk for developing a mood disorder were found to exhibit biases in attention and memory that are similar to those found for bipolar and unipolar depressed adults, suggesting that children at increased risk for affective disorder are characterized by potentially pathogenic cognitive structures that can be activated by sad mood. These findings offer insights into mechanisms of cognitive vulnerability for bipolar disorders.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Vagal withdrawal to a sad film predicts subsequent recovery from depression.

Cardiac vagal tone, as indexed by abnormalities in the level and/or reactivity of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), has been related to psychiatric impairment, including risk for depression. Longitudinal studies of depression have focused on RSA levels and have found mixed support for the hypothesis that low RSA levels predict a more pernicious course of depression. The current investigation focuses on the relation between RSA reactivity and the course of depression. We measured depressed persons' RSA reactivity to sadness-, fear-, and amusement-inducing emotion films and reassessed participants' diagnostic status 6 months later. Depressed persons who exhibited a higher degree of vagal withdrawal to the sad film were more likely to recover from depression. Implications for the study of RSA in depression are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Stability of DSM-IV criterion symptoms for major depressive disorder.

Given the chronic and recurrent nature of major depressive disorder (MDD), it is important to understand whether specific symptoms are stable over time or vary over the course of the disorder. This is the first longitudinal investigation examining the stability of the nine criterion symptoms of depression, as specified in the DSM-IV, among diagnosed depressed adults who were not recovered at follow-up. In this study, participants were assessed twice, ten months apart, with the structured clinical interview for DSM-IV, and stability of the nine criterion symptoms of MDD was examined. Findings indicate strong stability in individuals' symptom profiles. Among individuals who were clinically depressed at both assessments, there were no statistically significant fluctuations in specific symptoms endorsed. Changes in symptom endorsement among individuals who no longer met diagnostic criteria for MDD at Time 2 were attributable to reduced severity (i.e., number of symptoms) rather than to inconsistency of symptom endorsement. These results indicate that depressed individuals experience essentially the same pattern of specific symptoms over the course of a year. Variation in clinical course is likely to be attributable more to fluctuations in overall severity than to changes in specific symptoms of depression.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Brain activation to emotional words in depressed vs healthy subjects.

Depression involves either enhanced processing of negative stimuli or diminished processing of positive stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess brain activation in depressed vs healthy participants. Fifteen participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder and 15 controls were scanned during a lexical decision task involving neutral, happy, sad, and threat-related words. For happy words, depressed subjects exhibited less activation than did controls to happy words in fronto-temporal and limbic regions. For sad words, depressed subjects showed more activation than did controls in the inferior parietal lobule and less activation in the superior temporal gyrus and cerebellum, suggesting a complex activation pattern that varies for neural sub-circuits that may be associated with different cognitive or behavioral processes.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Gender differences in depression: the role of personality factors.

The goal of the study was to determine the association between gender and the Big Five personality factors, and to identify the role of personality factors in the association between gender and depression among adults in the United States. Data were drawn from the Midlife Development in the United States Survey (N=3032). Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to examine gender differences on the Big Five personality factors (i.e. agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, and conscientiousness). Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the relation between gender and depression, and to test whether this association is moderated by neuroticism. Levels of neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness were significantly higher among females than among males; in contrast, level of openness to experience was significantly higher among males. Female gender was associated with increased odds of experiencing depression. Results showed that neuroticism played a significant contributory role in the relationship between being female and major depression, though the role of gender remained statistically significant after adjustment. These data suggest that gender differences in personality factors, specifically neuroticism, may play a key role in the well-documented gender difference in depression. Our findings indicate that neuroticism may moderate the association between female gender and increased risk of depression among adults. These findings require replication using longitudinal data.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Attentional biases for negative interpersonal stimuli in clinical depression.

An information-processing paradigm was used to examine attentional biases in clinically depressed participants, participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and nonpsychiatric control participants for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Faces were presented for 1000 ms, at which point depressed participants had directed their attention selectively to depression-relevant (i.e., sad) faces. This attentional bias was specific to the emotion of sadness; the depressed participants did not exhibit attentional biases to the angry or happy faces. This bias was also specific to depression; at 1000 ms, participants with GAD were not attending selectively to sad, happy, or anxiety-relevant (i.e., angry) faces. Implications of these findings for both the cognitive and the interpersonal functioning of depressed individuals are discussed and directions for future research are advanced.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Coherence and specificity of information-processing biases in depression and social phobia.

Research has not resolved whether depression is associated with a distinct information-processing bias, whether the content of the information-processing bias in depression is specific to themes of loss and sadness, or whether biases are consistent across the tasks most commonly used to assess attention and memory processing. In the present study, participants diagnosed with major depression, social phobia, or no Axis I disorder, completed several information-processing tasks assessing attention and memory for sad, socially threatening, physically threatening, and positive stimuli. As predicted, depressed participants exhibited specific biases for stimuli connoting sadness; social phobic participants did not evidence such specificity for threat stimuli. It is important to note that the different measures of bias in memory and attention were not systematically intercorrelated. Implications for the study of cognitive bias in depression, and for cognitive theory more broadly, are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Individualized measurement of irrational beliefs in remitted depressives.

Recent reviews of cognitive theories of depression have noted that individualized assessment strategies might help to resolve mixed findings regarding the stability of depressotypic beliefs and attitudes. We describe encouraging results for an individualized measure of one such cognitive construct, irrational beliefs. Twenty depression-prone women (recurrent major depressives in full remission) and twenty closely matched never-depressed controls completed leading forced-choice measures of irrational beliefs (the Belief Scale; BS) and sociotropy-autonomy (The Revised Personal Style Inventory), as well as the Specific Demands on Self Scale (SDS). The BS requires participants to rate their agreement with twenty preselected statements of irrational beliefs, while the SDS focuses on whether participants harbor any strongly held irrational beliefs, even if uncommon or idiosyncratic. Consistent with previous research, there were no group differences on the traditional measure of irrational beliefs. In contrast, depression-prone participants strongly exceeded controls on the SDS, and this difference persisted after controlling for residual depression, anxiety symptoms, anxiety diagnoses, sociotropy, and autonomy. These findings provide some initial support for a key assumption of the rational-emotive model of depression, and, more broadly, suggest that individualized assessment strategies may help researchers capture the core negative beliefs of asymptomatic individuals, even in the absence of mood or cognitive priming.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Psychosocial functioning of young adults who have experienced and recovered from major depressive disorder during adolescence.

The authors examined whether adolescent major depressive disorder (MDD) was associated with difficulties in young adult functioning and whether differences would remain significant after accounting for nonmood disorder, MDD recurrence, functioning in adolescence, or current mood state. A total of 941 participants were assessed twice during adolescence and at age 24. In unadjusted analyses, adolescent MDD was associated with most young adult functioning measures. Associations were not due to interactions with adolescent comorbidity, but differences in global functioning and mental health treatment appeared as a result of MDD recurrence. Accounting for levels of functioning in adolescence or for current depression at age 24 eliminated the remaining associations. The implications of these findings for efforts to prevent MDD in adolescence are discussed.

Adolescent↗