Original articleIncreased Amygdala and Decreased Dorsolateral Prefrontal BOLD Responses in Unipolar Depression: Related and Independent Features
Section snippets
Participants
Thirty patients with major depressive disorder and 28 healthy control subjects (no current or historical Axis I disorder via SCID [First et al 1996] diagnoses; demographics in Table 1) participated. Participants described no health problems, eye problems, or psychoactive drug abuse in the past 6 months. Participants with a history of psychosis, manic, or hypomanic episodes, or antidepressant use within 2 weeks of testing (6 weeks for fluoxetine) were excluded. Participants reported no excessive
Behavioral Data
Participants rated words consistent with their assigned categories, F(2,52) = 371.2, p < .005, η2 = .94, although depressed individuals rated positive words as less positive than control subjects, valence × group F(2,52) = 3.08, p = .05, η2 = .11 (Table 1). There were no main effects or interactions with group or valence on PRRT reaction times (p > .15).
There were no group or condition-related effects on reaction time for digit sorting; these were not expected because responses were to targets
Discussion
Unmedicated depressed and healthy individuals completed cognitive (digit sorting), and emotional (personal relevance rating of words) tasks. As in our previous study (Siegle et al 2002), depressed individuals displayed increased and sustained amygdala activity for up to 15 sec in response to briefly presented (250 msec) negative words compared with control subjects, who displayed little amygdala activity on the task. Depressed participants also displayed decreased DLPFC activity on both tasks.
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