Mental state decoding abilities in clinical depression

Background sion is associated with profound impairments in social functioning. Past research and theory suggests that these impairments may be related to a difficulty in the ability of depressed individuals to identify and decode othersʹ social cues. However, the nature of this difficulty is equivocal. This investigation is the first to adopt a theory-of-mind framework to examine unipolar depressed individualsʹ ability to identify complex mental states from eye expressions. s with unipolar clinical depression (N = 52) and nondepressed controls (N = 30) completed the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task” (Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., Plumb, I., 2001. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry, 42, 241–251.). All participants also completed self-report measures assessing depressive and anxious symptoms. s sed women were significantly impaired in their ability to identify mental states in the Eyes task compared to nondepressed participants. This difference remained after controlling for anxiety and was stronger for the affective than the somatic symptoms of depression. tions esent study was limited by its sample size, resulting in low power for some comparisons. In addition, the study is limited by its use of a heterogeneous depressed sample, including outpatients and volunteers from the community, as well as its use of only female participants. sions sults demonstrate that severely depressed individuals are significantly impaired in their ability to decode othersʹ mental states. We suggest that strategies based on improving basic theory-of-mind reasoning could be incorporated into current therapeutic interventions for depressed individuals to ameliorate their understanding and interpretation of social information.