Facial affect processing and depression susceptibility: cognitive biases and cognitive neuroscience

Facial affect processing is essential to social development and functioning and is particularly relevant to models of depression. Although cognitive and interpersonal theories have long described different pathways to depression, cognitive-interpersonal and evolutionary social risk models of depression focus on the interrelation of interpersonal experience, cognition, and social behavior. We therefore review the burgeoning depressive facial affect processing literature and examine its potential for integrating disciplines, theories, and research. In particular, we evaluate studies in which information processing or cognitive neuroscience paradigms were used to assess facial affect processing in depressed and depression-susceptible populations. Most studies have assessed and supported cognitive models. This research suggests that depressed and depression-vulnerable groups show abnormal facial affect interpretation, attention, and memory, although findings vary based on depression severity, comorbid anxiety, or length of time faces are viewed. Facial affect processing biases appear to correspond with distinct neural activity patterns and increased depressive emotion and thought. Biases typically emerge in depressed moods but are occasionally found in the absence of such moods. Indirect evidence suggests that childhood neglect might cultivate abnormal facial affect processing, which can impede social functioning in ways consistent with cognitive-interpersonal and interpersonal models. However, reviewed studies provide mixed support for the social risk model prediction that depressive states prompt cognitive hypervigilance to social threat information. We recommend prospective interdisciplinary research examining whether facial affect processing abnormalities promote-or are promoted by-depressogenic attachment experiences, negative thinking, and social dysfunction.     

Modeling developmental cognitive neuroscience

In the past few years connectionist models have greatly contributed to formulating theories of cognitive development. Some of these models follow the approach of developmental cognitive neuroscience in exploring interactions between brain development and cognitive development by integrating structural change into learning. We describe two classes of these models. The first focuses on experience-dependent structural elaboration within a brain region by adding or deleting units and connections during learning. The second models the gradual integration of different brain areas based on combinations of experience-dependent and maturational factors. These models provide new theories of the mechanisms of cognitive change in various domains and they offer an integrated framework to study normal and abnormal development, and normal and impaired adult processing.     

The cognitive neuroscience of creativity

This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is proposed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous generation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evidence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this article. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age. Implications for the arts and sciences are briefly discussed.     

Differential cognitive response to a mood challenge following successful cognitive therapy or pharmacotherapy for unipolar depression

This study examined the nature of cognitive reactivity to mood changes in formerly depressed patients. Patients who recovered either through cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT; N = 25) or through pharmacotherapy (PT; N = 29) completed self-reported ratings of dysfunctional attitudes before and after a negative mood induction procedure. In response to similar levels of induced sad mood, PT patients showed a significant increase in dysfunctional cognitions compared with patients in the CBT group. To evaluate the effects of such cognitive reactivity on the subsequent course of depression, follow-up analyses reassessed 30 patients several years after initial testing. Results indicated that patients' reactions to the mood induction procedure were predictive of depressive relapse. These findings argue for differential effects of treatment on cognitive reactivity to mood induction and for the link between such reactivity and risk for later depressive relapse.     

Intentional concepts in cognitive neuroscience

In this article, I develop an account of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. As pointed out by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, intentional language abounds in neuroscience theories. According to Bennett and Hacker, the subpersonal use of intentional predicates results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclusion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the contemporary philosophy of science, I show that although the use of intentional predicates in mechanistic explanations sometimes leads to explanatorily inert claims, intentional predicates can also successfully feature in mechanistic explanations as tools for the functional analysis of the explanandum phenomenon. Despite the similarities between my account and Daniel Dennett's intentional-stance approach, I argue that intentional stance should not be understood as a theory of subpersonal causal explanation, and therefore cannot be used to assess the explanatory role of intentional predicates in neuroscience. Finally, I outline a general strategy for answering the question of what kind of language can be employed in mechanistic explanations.     

Social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression

The social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression is inherently multidisciplinary. Depressive disorders beginning early in life can have serious developmental and functional consequences. Psychopathology research has described depression's defining clinical and contextual features, and intervention research has characterized its response to treatment and prevention programs. Neuroendocrine, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have identified core neurobiological aspects of early-onset mood disorders. These areas are reviewed using a developmental social neuroscience perspective for integrating disparate observations. The paper introduces a dynamic adaptive systems framework, and it discusses hedonic capacity, stress sensitivity, ruminative self-focus, and attentional impairments as fundamental components of mood disorders.     

Understanding vulnerability for depression from a cognitive neuroscience perspective: A reappraisal of attentional factors and a new conceptual framework

We propose a framework to understand increases in vulnerability for depression after recurrent episodes that links attention processes and schema activation to negative mood states, by integrating cognitive and neurobiological findings. Depression is characterized by a mood-congruent attentional bias at later stages of information processing. The basic idea of our framework is that decreased activity in prefrontal areas, mediated by the serotonin metabolism which the HPA axis controls, is associated with an impaired attenuation of subcortical regions, resulting in prolonged activation of the amygdala in response to stressors in the environment. Reduced prefrontal control in interaction with depressogenic schemas leads to impaired ability to exert attentional inhibitory control over negative elaborative processes such as rumination, leading in turn to sustained negative affect. These elaborative processes are triggered by the activation of negative schemas after confrontation with stressors. In our framework, attentional impairments are postulated as a crucial process in explaining the increasing vulnerability after depressive episodes, linking cognitive and biological vulnerability factors. We review the empirical data on the biological factors associated with the attentional impairments and detail how they are associated with rumination and mood regulation. The aim of our framework is to stimulate translational research.     

A cognitive neuroscience account of posttraumatic stress disorder and its treatment

Recent research in the areas of animal conditioning, the neural systems underlying emotion and memory, and the effect of fear on these systems is reviewed. This evidence points to an important distinction between hippocampally-dependent and non-hippocampally-dependent forms of memory that are differentially affected by extreme stress. The cognitive science perspective is related to a recent model of posttraumatic stress disorder, dual representation theory, that also posits separate memory systems underlying vivid reexperiencing versus ordinary autobiographical memories of trauma. This view is compared with other accounts in the literature of traumatic memory processes in PTSD, and the contrasting implications for therapy are discussed.     

Understanding implicit memory. A cognitive neuroscience approach.

Dissociations between implicit and explicit memory have attracted considerable attention in recent memory research. A central issue concerns whether such dissociations require the postulation of separate memory systems or are best understood in terms of different processes operating within a single system. This article presents a cognitive neuroscience approach to implicit memory in general and the systems-processes debate in particular, which draws on evidence from research with brain-damaged patients, neuroimaging techniques, and nonhuman primates. The article illustrates how a cognitive neuroscience orientation can help to supply a basis for postulating memory systems, can provide useful constraints for processing views, and can encourage the use of research strategies that the author refers to as cross-domain hypothesis testing and cross-domain hypothesis generation, respectively. The cognitive neuroscience orientation suggests a complementary role for multiple systems and processing approaches.     

The cognitive neuroscience of auditory distraction

We are often aware of the content of distracting sound, although typically remain unaware of the processes by which that sound is disruptive. Disruption can occur even when the sound is ignored and unrelated to the task being performed. In a recent major development, Gisselg?rd et al. have used positron emission tomography to reveal how distracting sounds recruit the involvement of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.     

From objects to names: A cognitive neuroscience approach

To name an object, we need both to recognize it and to access the associated phonological form, and phonological retrieval itself may be constrained by aspects of the visual recognition process. This paper reviews evidence for such constraints, drawing on data from experimental psychology, neuropsychology, functional imaging, and computational modelling. Data on picture identification in normal observers demonstrate that the speed of name retrieval processes differs for natural objects and artifacts, due at least in part to differences in visual similarity between exemplars within these categories. Also, effects of variables on early and late stages of object identification combine in an interactive rather than an additive manner, consistent with object processing stages operating in a continuous rather than a discrete manner. Neuropsychological evidence supports this proposal, demonstrating that subtle perceptual deficits can produce naming problems, even when there is good access to associated semantic knowledge. Functional activation studies further show increased activity in visual processing areas when conditions stress object naming relative to the recognition of familiar object structures. These studies indicate that object naming is based on a series of continuous processing stages and that naming involves increased visual processing relative to recognition tasks. The data can be modelled within an interactive activation and competition framework. Received: 25 November 1997 / Accepted: 16 May 1998     

The emergence of social cognitive neuroscience

Social cognitive neuroscience is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research that seeks to understand phenomena in terms of interactions between 3 levels of analysis: the social level, which is concerned with the motivational and social factors that influence behavior and experience; the cognitive level, which is concerned with the information-processing mechanisms that give rise to social-level phenomena; and the neural level, which is concerned with the brain mechanisms that instantiate cognitive-level processes. The social cognitive neuroscience approach entails conducting studies and constructing theories that make reference to all 3 levels and contrasts with traditional social psychological and cognitive neuroscientific research that primarily makes reference to 2 levels. The authors present an introduction to and analysis of the field by reviewing current research and providing guidelines and suggested directions for future work.     

The cognitive neuroscience of signed language

The present article is an assessment of the current state of knowledge in the field of cognitive neuroscience of signed language. Reviewed lesion data show that the left hemisphere is dominant for perception and production of signed language in aphasics, in a fashion similar to spoken language aphasia. Several neuropsychological dissociations support this claim: Non-linguistic visuospatial functions can be dissociated from spatial functions and general motor deficits can be dissociated from execution of signs. Reviewed imaging data corroborate the lesion data in that the importance of the left hemisphere is re-confirmed. The data also establish the role of the right hemisphere in signed language processing. Alternative hypotheses regarding what aspects of signed language processing are handled by the right hemisphere are currently tested. The second section of the paper starts by addressing the role that early acquisition of signed and spoken language play for the neurofunctional activation patterns in the brain. Compensatory cognitive and communicative enhancements have also been documented as a function of early sign language use, suggesting an interesting interaction between language and cognition. Recent behavioural data on sign processing in working memory--a cognitive system important for language perception and production suggest e.g. phonological loop effects analogous to those obtained for speech processing. Neuroimaging studies will have to address this potential communality.     

Developmental cognitive neuroscience: progress and potential

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is an evolving field that investigates the relations between neural and cognitive development. Lying at the intersection of diverse disciplines, work in this area promises to shed light on classic developmental questions, mechanisms subserving developmental change, diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders, and cognitive and neuroscientific topics traditionally considered outside the domain of development. Fundamental questions include: What are the interrelations between developmental changes in the brain (e.g. in connectivity, chemistry, morphology) and developmental changes in children's behavior and cognitive abilities (e.g. representational complexity, ability to sustain selective attention, speed of processing)? Why, and how, is learning enhanced during certain periods in development? How is our knowledge organized, and how does this change with development? We discuss preliminary investigations of such questions and directions for future work.     

Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience investigations of self-experience have mainly focused on the mental attribution of features to the self (self-related processing). In this paper, we highlight another fundamental, yet neglected, aspect of self-experience, that of being an agent. We propose that this aspect of self-experience depends on self-specifying processes, ones that implicitly specify the self by implementing a functional self/non-self distinction in perception, action, cognition and emotion. We describe two paradigmatic cases - sensorimotor integration and homeostatic regulation - and use the principles from these cases to show how cognitive control, including emotion regulation, is also self-specifying. We argue that externally directed, attention-demanding tasks, rather than suppressing self-experience, give rise to the self-experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. We conclude with directions for experimental work based on our framework.