Abnormal social interactive behavior in major depressive disorder

Main depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by a determined and overwhelming feeling of sadness. Emotional process, including emotional reaction and feeling states, are a significant factor with a major impact on decision making. Previous studies have found that the abnormal feeling state in patients with MDD may bias their decision-making behaviors, as evidenced from altered sensitivity to reward and punishment, reduced experiences of regret, and poor decision performance. in spite of these significant findings in MDD, all these studies have investigate people in non-social interaction contexts, in which actions only have consequences for the self-interests of the participants . However, many real-life decision harms involve social exchanges with other individuals and a firm division of economic outcomes among them. The power of the depressive state on real-life economic decisions has rarely been studied in a social interaction context. Considering that MDD affects up to 20% of the worldwide population, the manipulate of the depressive state on social-economic decisions is an important research question. Ecologically valid social decision-making paradigms such as the ultimatum game (UG) may help identify suboptimal choices associated with MDD and, thus, may provide a potential bridge for translation research in MDD. The UG is a normally used paradigm to study the process of decision-making in a social interaction context. In the UG, a proposer suggests a way to divide a fixed sum of money. The responder has to accept or reject the proposal.

Author(s): Yuan Zhou

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