Harlé, K. M., Allen, J. J., & Sanfey, A. G. (2010). The impact of depression on social economic decision making. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 119(2), 440-446.
PMID: 20455617;PMCID: PMC2869467;Abstract:
Although the role of emotion in social economic decision making has been increasingly recognized, the impact of mood disorders, such as depression, on such decisions has been surprisingly neglected. To address this gap, 15 depressed and 23 nondepressed individuals completed a well-known economic task, in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Although depressed individuals reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair offers, they accepted significantly more of these offers than did controls. A positive relationship was observed in the depressed group, but not in controls, between acceptance rates of unfair offers and resting cardiac vagal control, a physiological index of emotion regulation capacity. The discrepancy between depressed individuals' increased emotional reactions to unfair offers and their decisions to accept more of these offers contrasts with recent findings that negative mood in nondepressed individuals can lead to lower acceptance rates. This suggests distinct biasing processes in depression, which may be related to higher reliance on regulating negative emotion. © 2010 American Psychological Association.
Matsuda, I., Nittono, H., & Allen, J. J. (2013). Detection of concealed information by P3 and frontal EEG asymmetry. Neuroscience Letters, 537, 55-59.
PMID: 23370285;Abstract:
Psychophysiological detection of deception has seen increased attention in both research and applied settings. In this field, the most scientifically validated paradigm is the Concealed Information Test (CIT). The CIT does not directly deal with whether a participant is lying, but examines whether a participant recognizes a critical relevant detail, inferred by differences in physiological responses between critical and non-critical items. Although event-related potential (ERP) approaches to the CIT have shown high accuracy, a combination of measures might improve the test's performance. We thus assessed whether a new CIT index, frontal EEG asymmetry that is supposed to reflect differences in approach/withdrawal motivation, would prove useful. Nineteen participants were asked to steal one item in a mock crime, and were then administered two CITs while concealing the stolen item. One CIT included the stolen item (i.e., guilty condition), whereas the other CIT did not (i.e., innocent condition). In the guilty condition, the concealed stolen item elicited greater relative left frontal alpha activity (indicative of relative right frontal cortical activity) as compared to the other items, suggesting that the recognition of the concealed item might have induced withdrawal motivation. Although the discrimination between guilty and innocent conditions by the asymmetry score alone was not as good as that by the ERP P3 index, combining the asymmetry score and P3 improved the detection performance significantly. The results suggest that the frontal EEG asymmetry can be used as a new measure in the CIT that provides additional information beyond that captured by the traditional ERP index. © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
Smith, R., Allen, J. J., Thayer, J. F., Fort, C., & Lane, R. D. (2014). Increased association over time between regional frontal lobe BOLD change magnitude and cardiac vagal control with sertraline treatment for major depression. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 224, 225--233.
Chambers, A. S., & J., J. (2002). Vagal tone as an indicator of treatment response in major depression. Psychophysiology, 39(6), 861-864.
PMID: 12462513;Abstract:
Increased vagal tone has been associated with treatment success using pharmacological agents and cognitive-behavioral treatment in major depression, but not using electroconvulsive therapy. The present study investigated whether increases in vagal tone would be associated with favorable treatment response with nonpharmacological treatment. At baseline and following treatment, 16 subjects were administered the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) followed by electrocardiographic recording. Those with little change in vagal tone from before to after treatment showed minimal reduction in HRSD score (-48); those with larger vagal tone change showed a large decrease in HRSD score (-14.8). Changes in vagal tone are thus related to favorable treatment response in depression, and do not represent anticholinergic pharmacological effects. Future work manipulating vagal tone might prove informative in teasing apart the causal role of vagal tone and depression.
Smith, R., Allen, J. J., Thayer, J. F., & Lane, R. D. (2016). Regional Frontal Lobe Response Magnitudes During Affective Shifting Covary With Resting Heart Rate Variability in Healthy Volunteers. Journal of Psychophysiology.
