Examine the association between depression and emotion-related perceptual decision-making under selective attention

Abstract

Decision-making is a critical aspect in our daily lives and humans have a natural inclination to selectively attend to information that matches our beliefs, values and preferences. Our emotional brain also affects the quality and accuracy of our decisions. With robust findings regarding biased decisions in individuals with depression, the underlying mechanism is not well understood. Unlike previous research, which primarily employed single-stimulus paradigms to study emotion-related perceptual decision-making, our study utlilised a multi-element paradigm to examine the roles of emotional outliers and top-down attention in perceptual decision-making, with a particular focus on their relationship with depression. A total of 100 adults participated in an emotion-related perceptual decision-making task in which they made judgements about emotional faces along a fearful-happy continuum under different valence of emotional outliers (no, fearful, happy) and attention manipulation (null-attention, fear-attention, happy-attention). Results revealed the role of emotional outliers and emotion-related attention in decision-making. While fearful outliers prompted more fearful choices and quicker decisions, participants were more conservative and responded slower in fear-attention. In contrast, happy-attention boosted decision speed. Nonetheless, depression symptom measures did not impact any of the relationships and none of the interactions were significant. With partial support to our hypotheses, we discussed possible explanations that could account for the insignificant findings and several methodological issues that might contribute to them. Further refinement to study design and analysis was warranted. Despite these limitations, our study provided novel insights into the mechanisms underlying emotion-related perceptual decision-making in depression.