Spatial affect learning restricted in major depression relative to anxiety disorders and healthy controls

Abstract

Detecting and learning the location of unpleasant or pleasant scenarios, or spatial affect learning, is an essential skill that safeguards well-being (Crawford & Cacioppo, 2002). Potentially altered by psychiatric illness, this skill has yet to be measured in adults with and without major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders (AD). This study enrolled 199 adults diagnosed with MDD and AD (n=53), MDD (n=47), AD (n=54), and no disorders (n=45). Measures included clinical interviews, self-reports, and a validated spatial affect task using affective pictures (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005). Participants with MDD showed impaired spatial affect learning of negative stimuli and irrelevant learning of pleasant pictures compared with non-depressed adults. Adults with MDD may use a “GOOD is UP” heuristic reflected by their impaired learning of the opposite correlation (i.e., “BAD is UP”) and performance in the pleasant version of the task.

Keywords:

• Spatial affect learning
• Major depression
• Anxiety disorder

We gratefully acknowledge Peter Lang and his team for their support, our teams for their work (Sarah Polis, Becca Shor, Sarah Getch, Jennifer Caldwell, Kelly Neville, Caroline Cozza, Holly Hunley, Sara Michelson, Shandra Brown, Justin Birnholz, Kallio Hunnicott, Bjorn Hanson, Noah Yulish) and Elizabeth Crawford for insightful comments.

We gratefully acknowledge Peter Lang and his team for their support, our teams for their work (Sarah Polis, Becca Shor, Sarah Getch, Jennifer Caldwell, Kelly Neville, Caroline Cozza, Holly Hunley, Sara Michelson, Shandra Brown, Justin Birnholz, Kallio Hunnicott, Bjorn Hanson, Noah Yulish) and Elizabeth Crawford for insightful comments.

Notes

¹ The positive and negative test sets each contained 15 images not used in the training sets. IAPS numbers for stimuli in the negative test set: 1220, 2271, 2752, 3500, 7130, 9006, 9010, 9102, 9190, 9340, 9401, 9417, 9430, 9480, 9910 (M_valence=3.36; SD=0.87; M_arousal=4.68; SD=0.31). IAPS numbers for stimuli in the positive test set: 1121, 2352, 2485, 4608, 5260, 5628, 5990, 7100, 7233, 7450, 7550, 8080, 8170, 8250, 8502 (M_valence=6.46; SD=0.90; M_arousal=4.92; SD=1.19).

² Participants who did not complete Visit 2 were no more depressed than participants who completed Visits 1 and 2 (HRSD, t= − 0.40, p>.05; BDI-II, t= − 0.40, p>.05), nor more anxious (HARS, t=1.7, p>.05; BAI, t=1.9, p>.05). Also, a chi-square analyses revealed no significant group differences between completers and non-completers on demographic indices (i.e., sex, ethnicity, marital status, employment status).

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (P50 MH 52384-01A1 P01), Dr Peter Lang, NIMH Centre for the Study of Emotion and Attention, University of Florida, Gainesville FL.