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 insensi- tivity (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. Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a devastating, sometimes fatal, psychiatric condition that afflicts nearly one fifth of the population (Kessler, 2002).The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-IV) classifies MDD as a mood disorder (American Psychiatric Association (APA), 1994).Indeed, durable disturbance of mood is one of the most salient features of MDD. DSM-IV diagnostic criteria specify symptoms of at least 2 weeks' duration that implicate deficient positive affect (e.g., anhedonia), excessive negative affect (e.g., guilt), or both. Consistent with these diagnostic criteria, depressed patients consistently report low levels of positive affect and high levels of negative affect on questionnaire and interview measures (Clark, Watson, & Mineka, 1994). Researchers studying depression have increasingly sought to clarify how this mood disorder alters emotional reactivity.One problem in addressing this question is that the core terms of mood and emotion are notoriously slippery and have often been used in confusing and contradictory ways.Following contemporary affec- tive science (e.g., Rottenberg & Gross, 2003), here we refer to moods as diffuse, slow-moving feeling states that are weakly tied to specific objects or elicitors (Watson, 2000).In contrast, emo- tions refer to quick-moving reactions that occur when an organism processes a meaningful stimulus that exercises its adaptive capac- ities (e.g., Ekman, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Emotional reactions typically involve coordinated changes in emotional feel- ings, behavior, and physiology and last for seconds or minutes (Keltner & Gross, 1999).Again by contrast, moods last for hours or days and exert their clearest effects on feelings and cognitions (as opposed to behavior or physiology).Using these definitions, we see that the syndrome of depression necessarily involves changes in mood but does not require changes in emotional reactions. Most conceptions of the relation between moods and emotions view these constructs as linked, with moods altering the probabil- ity of having specific emotions.More specifically, moods are generally thought to potentiate like-valenced or matching emotions (e.g., irritable mood facilitates angry reactions; Rosenberg, 1998). If this logic were to be extended to clinical mood states, one would expect depressed persons' lack of positive mood to attenuate positive emotional reactivity and their high levels of negative mood to potentiate negative emotional reactivity.In the following sections, we review experimental evidence that bears on these predictions.