The Neural Representation of Self in Depression Patients

Beijing Normal University23 enrolled

Overview

To be aware of oneself as a unique entity in the world occurs early in human development and is the prerequisite of normal social functioning. The disturbance of self representation characterizes a variety of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Negative self-bias was found to serve as the core cognitive mechanism of depression disorder. However, there was no evidence to show the reason lead to negative bias. In the current study, investigators hypothesized that the blurring self representation was the neural correlates in depression disorder.

To test investigators' hypothesis, investigators adopted the self-referential task and fMRI to investigate the neural representation of self in depression patients, and compared with healthy control.

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

Conditions

Depression Disorder Healthy

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 60 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * Patients should be clinical diagnosis of major depression disorder. * Healthy control participants should be age-matched with depression group, and should have no history of neurological or psychiatric diagnoses Exclusion Criteria: * Patients who also have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder * Healthy controls who have history of mental disorders

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Neural representation of self

We adopted the self referential task. In the task, participants were asked to judge whether a given word was appropriate to describe oneself (self-judgement condition), a celebrity (other-judgement condition) by pressing one of the two buttons with the index or middle finger. For judgments of each target person (i.e, self and celebrity), there were 3 categories of words describing the mental (personality traits, such as hard-working, friendly), physical (physical attributes, such as black hair, big eyes) and social (social roles, such as student, American) dimension of person knowledge. The fMRI task contained 6 runs, with 4.6 minutes per run. This paradigm and task allowed us to investigated the neural representation of self by comparing the BOLD activity under self-judgement condition with BOLD activity under other-judgement condition.

Time frame: through study completion, an average of 2 year

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

This platform is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional.