Abstract
Adolescent girls are a high-risk stratum for the emergence of depression. Previous research has established that depression is associated with blunted responses to rewards. Research using Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) has found that deficits in accumulating reward-based evidence characterize adult depression. However, little is known about how reduced reward sensitivity is reflected in the computational processes involved in reward-based decision-making in late childhood and early adolescent depression.
One hundred and sixty-six 8- to 14-year-old girls completed a probabilistic reward-based decision-making task. Participants were instructed to identify which one of two similar visual stimuli were presented, and correct responses were rewarded with unequal probabilities. Analysis using hierarchical DDM quantified rate of evidence accumulation (i.e., drift rate) and starting point. Depression severity was measured using the Children’s Depression Inventory.
Across all participants, there was a higher drift rate, indicating faster evidence accumulation, for the more frequently rewarded than the less frequently rewarded decision. In addition, the starting point of the evidence accumulation was closer to the more frequently rewarded decision, indicating a starting point bias. Higher depression severity was associated with a slower drift rate for both types of decisions. Higher depression severity was associated with a smaller starting point bias towards the more frequently rewarded decision.
The current study uses computational modeling to reveal that late childhood and early adolescent girls with greater depression demonstrate impairments in the reward-related evidence accumulation process.
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27 April 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-023-01066-9
Notes
We also investigated clinician-rated depression diagnosis using K-SADS as an alternative approach toward conceptualizing and quantifying depression, in which eight individuals formed the depressed group and the rest formed the non-depressed group. A between-group comparison supported the findings observed using the dimensional approach.
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The authors thank the research team at Stony Brook University and the participants and their family members.
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This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (GH, BN, grant number MH097767), The University of Hong Kong (JJ).
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The original online version of this article was revised: We noticed that our calculation for one of the measures of response bias in decision-making, c-bias, contained an error. After correction, the results and overall interpretation of results are not impacted by this error. We have made corrections in 2 places.
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Pitliya, R.J., Nelson, B.D., Hajcak, G. et al. Drift-Diffusion Model Reveals Impaired Reward-Based Perceptual Decision-Making Processes Associated with Depression in Late Childhood and Early Adolescent Girls. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol 50, 1515–1528 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-022-00936-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-022-00936-y