Cognitive mechanism for meaning of emotive words in depressed personality: an event-related potential study

We investigated the relationship between the ERP modulation of emotive words and the depression score in thirty-five healthy subjects with both high and low Beck Depression Inventory scores. The event-related evoked potentials (ERP) were measured following a visual presentation of emotive adjectives. Each word was classified into two sets of categories by each subject, i.e., positive or negative, and fit or unfit to his/her personality. The ERP signals were then separately averaged according to the subject's classifications. After stimulation, positive and negative ERP components at 200 ms (P2) and 400 ms (N2), respectively, were enhanced in amplitude in subjects with a high depression score. The enhancement of the P2 and N2 components was not related to the subject's categorization of the words. The results suggest that hypersensitivity to non-specific emotive words might be a neurophysiological phenomenon in a depressive state in healthy subjects.