Dissociating disorders of depression, anxiety, and their comorbidity with measures of emotional processing: A joint analysis of visual brain potentials and auditory perceptual asymmetries
Lidia Y.X. Panier1, Priya Wickramaratne1,2, Daniel M. Alschuler1, Myrna M. Weissman1,2, Jonathan E. Posner1,2, Marc J. Gameroff1,2, Gerard E. Bruder2, Jürgen Kayser1,2
1New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA; 2Department of Psychiatry, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Received 28 July 2020; revised 27 December 2020; accepted 28 January 2021; available online 5 February 2021.
Abstract
In a multigenerational study of families at risk for depression, individuals with a lifetime history of depression had: 1) abnormal perceptual asymmetry (PA; smaller left ear/right hemisphere [RH] advantage) in a dichotic emotion recognition task, and 2) reduced RH late positive potential (P3RH) during an emotional hemifield task. We used standardized difference scores for processing auditory (PA sad-neutral) and visual (P3RH negative-neutral) stimuli for 112 participants (52 men) in a logistic regression to predict history of depression, anxiety or comorbidity of both. Whereas comorbidity was separately predicted by reduced PA (OR = 0.527, p = .042) or P3RH (OR = 0.457, p = .013) alone, an interaction between PA and P3RH (OR = 2.499, p = .011) predicted depressive disorder. Follow-up analyses revealed increased probability of depression at low (lack of emotional differentiation) and high (heightened reactivity to negative stimuli) levels of both predictors. Findings suggest that reduced or heightened right-lateralized emotional responsivity to negative stimuli may be uniquely associated with depression.
Key Words: depression; anxiety; emotional lateralization; visual ERPs; dichotic listening