Impaired social decision making in patients with major depressive disorder

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Zhe-Ning Liu¹  Peng Wang¹  Guo-Wei Wu¹  Shu Li²  Yuan Zhou²  Yun Wang³ 

[1] Institute of Mental Health, Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, 410011, Changsha, China;Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101, Beijing, China;University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100049, Beijing, China;

关键词: Ultimatum game;    Major depressive disorder;    Decision making;    Fairness;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-14-18

 received in 2013-09-25, accepted in 2014-01-20,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAbnormal decision-making processes have been observed in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is unresolved whether MDD patients show abnormalities in decision making in a social interaction context, in which decisions have actual influences on both the self-interests of the decision makers per se and those of their partners.MethodsUsing a well-studied ultimatum game (UG), which is frequently used to investigate social interaction behavior, we examined whether MDD can be associated with abnormalities in social decision-making behavior by comparing the acceptance rates of MDD patients (N = 14) with those of normal controls (N = 19).ResultsThe acceptance rates of the patients were lower than those of the normal controls. Additionally, unfair proposals were accepted at similar rates from computer partners and human partners in the MDD patients, unlike the acceptance rates in the normal controls, who were able to discriminatively treat unfair proposals from computer partners and human partners.ConclusionsDepressed patients show abnormal decision-making behavior in a social interaction context. Several possible explanations, such as increased sensitivity to fairness, negative emotional state and disturbed affective cognition, have been proposed to account for the abnormal social decision-making behavior in patients with MDD. This aberrant social decision-making behavior may provide a new perspective in the search to find biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of MDD.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.