Increased amygdala response to positive social feedback in young people with major depressive disorder

Abstract

Background: Studies of depressed patients have demonstrated increased amygdala activation to negative affective stimuli. In this study, we used a paradigm that employed personally relevant social stimuli, which are known to strongly activate the amygdala, to test whether the amygdala demonstrated aberrant activity in depressed participants as they responded to stimuli with positive valence. Methods: Nineteen patients with major depressive disorder, aged 15 to 24 years, were matched with 20 healthy control participants. They completed a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging task in which they received social feedback from people who they believed had evaluated them. Voxelwise statistica..