Free-viewing gaze patterns reveal a mood-congruency bias in MDD during an affective fMRI/eye-tracking task

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been related to abnormal amygdala activity during emotional face processing. However, a recent large-scale study (n = 28,638) found no such correlation, which is probably due to the low precision of fMRI measurements. To address this issue, we used simultaneous fMRI and eye-tracking measurements during a commonly employed emotional face recognition task. Eye-tracking provide high-precision data, which can be used to enrich and potentially stabilize fMRI readouts. With the behavioral response, we additionally divided the active task period into a task-related and a free-viewing phase to explore the gaze patterns of MDD patients and healthy controls (HC) and compare their respective neural correlates. Our analysis showed that a mood-congruency attentional bias could be detected in MDD compared to healthy controls during the free-viewing phase but without parallel amygdala disruption. Moreover, the neural correlates of gaze patterns reflected more prefrontal fMRI activity in the free-viewing than the task-related phase. Taken together, spontaneous emotional processing in free viewing might lead to a more pronounced mood-congruency bias in MDD, which indicates that combined fMRI with eye-tracking measurement could be beneficial for our understanding of the underlying psychopathology of MDD in different emotional processing phases.Trial Registration: The BeCOME study is registered on ClinicalTrials (gov: NCT03984084) by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany.