Internalization disorders such as depression are characterized by extensive monitoring of one's own emotional and cognitive processing. Whether this focus on internal signals is associated with impairments in the processing of external signals was the subject of the present research project.
We examined 38 individuals diagnosed with depression and 38 control subjects. They performed a choice reaction task with informative feedback and a passive observation task while an electroencephalogram was recorded. The vertex positive potential in the event-related brain potential of the group with depression was significantly reduced in both tasks compared to the control group. This result suggests reduced early information processing of external visual stimuli in depression. Depression therefore influences the distribution of attention resources and can thus also affect other areas of cognitive processing.
Original language: German