## 3 Research Gaps  
Despite of the prominence of cognitive vulnerability models and the popularity of non-invasive EEG methodology, so far, the literature lacks studies that systematically investigate the time course of emotional processing and its interaction with self-referential processing in line with cognitive vulnerability models in controlled experimental laboratory settings in cognitively vulnerable individuals at risk of depression, with healthy, cognitively non-vulnerable individuals as controls. Investigating the hypothesis of cognitively vulnerable models by means of EEG-ERP methods requires appropriate experimental paradigms that allow to experimentally manipulate the self-reference and the emotionality/the emotional significance of the stimuli independently from, as well as in combination with, each other to induce and trigger self-referential as well as emotional processing at the stage of associative stimulus processing in a bottom-up fashion without any influence from higher-order, task-induced self-referential or emotional processing. This seems crucial to test the early interactions between self-reference and emotion processing postulated by cognitive vulnerability models to occur during implicit associative processing conditions compared to cognitively controlled reflective processing conditions (see Figure 1). So far, experimental paradigms that investigated the interaction between emotion and self-referential processing in healthy controls and depressive subjects have almost exclusively induced self-referential processing explicitly via task instructions. In particular, paradigms such as the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET [26]) have been used, e.g., [26; 27; 28; 29]. In this paradigm, participants are exposed to positive and negative personality traits and asked to judge which of the trait words describe them best. Afterwards, the participants are often asked to recall the words presented. The results of several studies suggest that words that have been judged to describe the self and are thus considered to be congruent with the person's own self-views are also better remembered e.g., [30], with healthy subjects  
Figure 2: Temporal processing in the EEG as exemplified by the modulation of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). differing from depressive subjects in their performance [26; 27; 28; 29]. Studies recording EEG-ERP parameters during the SRET in healthy individuals and in individuals suffering from current or remittent depressive disorder [31; 32; 33] have found differential processing of positive and negative trait words as a function of group (healthy participants vs. participants with current or remitted depression) during later stages of stimulus processing [31; 32; 33; 34]. Temporally earlier processing differences in the time window of early ERPs as a function of group (healthy participants vs. participants with current or remitted depression) have been reported only occasionally in the SRET [33]. Given that in the SRET, self-reference is induced via task instructions, there is a search for tasks and paradigms that allow the independent experimental manipulation of the dimensions of self-reference and emotion based on stimuli instead of task to assess not only the reflective aspects of self-referential processing, but also the associative and stimulus-driven effects of self-referential processing on emotion processing, independent from, as well as in comparison with, task-induced affordances and cognitive demands. Experimental paradigms that allow both, the independent experimental manipulation and the joint assessment of the effects of the self-referentiality and the emotionality elicited by a stimulus are paradigms such as the so-called 'HisMine' paradigm [for an overview see below or the Supplementary Materials].