The Progression in Understanding Depression

 

    Depression is nothing new in this world, but the progress being made to understand it is still at large. Many of us are aware of some of the strategies used to treat certain types of disorders. By this, I am referring to the common use of antidepressants and therapeutical practices such as cognitive behavioral therapy or psychodynamic therapy. However, through much research being done around depression, there are other aspects of our lives that have a correlation to the levels of depression people develop. With more research and findings on depression happening, the rest of the community can come to understand how to care for ourselves and relieve any type of depression we may be feeling, whether it be diagnosed or a bad day.

    In “Abnormal emotional reactivity in depression: Contrasting theoretical models using neurophysiological data” by Hill et. al.’s research team, we are introduced to a model being done on major depressive disorder (MDD). Through the talk given by Ian Kahrilas on this topic and research document, it is understood that there are different models that include aspects of emotional reactivity, emotional regulation, and savoring capacity that generate an impact on the measure of depression an individual has during the time of the study. What was seen in one part of the study was that those with low positive affectivity and high negative affectivity, savoring the moment may alleviate depression. So, what this entails is that there can be certain actions that regulate the positive emotions of an individual to counteract the idea of someone having a negative affectivity. To make clear as well, negative affectivity is a shared response from positive affectivity and anxious arousal that develops into a characterization of how one understands or has depression. Another part of the research done by Hill’s team was that they used a late positive potential technique. The use of LPPs was to understand the components of PCA and show where emotional reactivity and emotional regulation appeared the most. What was found specifically was that there was a stable arousal and valence effect throughout the time course in emotional reactivity. For emotional regulation, the negative regulatory processes unfolded earlier at 124 ms to 259 ms while the positive regulatory processed occurred later from 259 ms to 740 ms.  

    The final part of the research by Hill’s team was that they created a structural equation model since the use of ERPs was still not looked clearly with the various techniques discussed in the paper. This part of the research was interesting as it involved different perspectives of clinical psychology, affective neuroscience, and advanced statistical techniques to look at depression. Also, it shows the importance of studying the positive and negative stimuli and outcomes for depression simultaneously since looking at two different data sets from different labs can be difficult to determine what is important for understanding depression. In the end, the findings for this part of the study showed that emotional reactivity was related to depression rather than depression symptoms or anxiety.

    In a different study titled “The Prospective Association between Sleep Deprivation and Depression among Adolescents”, Robert E. Roberts and Hao T. Duong worked on examining the correlation between sleep and depression. They also focused on major depression and conducted their analyses based on the criteria of the DSM-IV and the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children, Version IV (DISC-IV). Their results were as predicted based on the information from the DSM-IV and the DISC-IV, which shows that sleep deprivation and symptoms of depression covary at the baseline. In addition, at the baseline level from where sleep deprivation and depression stood, there was a n increased risk for symptoms from 25-38%. However, the interesting part about the study was that there was no association made for depressive symptoms on sleep deprivation. What would be interesting for further research on this study would be to make a cross-sectional analysis between different age groups and the amount of sleep they receive on a regular basis. I think that this would help to see how much does sleep deprivation and age have an effect on depressive symptoms. In addition, it would be interesting to see if the reciprocal is correlated, in which depressive symptoms have an effect on sleep.

    In the end, there is so much work to be done on understanding depression, most specifically major depression disorder. I would like to see how these two studies relate in some way. For example, how would a sleep-deprived individual respond to the different stimuluses of positive and negative emotional reactivity? Also, how do aspects such as sleep deprivation and depression systems relate to the PCA components of the LPP study? There are many things that can be done to further understand how different things can lead to the presence of depression in an individual. Not to mention how the world is right now under a pandemic and how levels of depression are higher than usual. Unfortunately, depression is something that is not going away, but that does not mean we cannot leave it be. The more we do research on it and help people, the more we can see what works.

   Works Cited

Hill, K.E., South, S.C., Egan, R.P., &Foti, D. (2019). Abnormal emotional reactivity in depression: Contrasting theoretical models using neurophysiological data. Biological psychology, 141, 35-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.12.011

Roberts RE, Duong HT. The prospective association between sleep deprivation and depression among adolescents. Sleep. 2014 Feb 1;37(2):239-44. doi: 10.5665/sleep.3388. PMID: 24497652; PMCID: PMC3900610.