Defocused mode in depressed mood and its changes in time-frequency attention-related beta

Depressed mood has been proposed to possibly possess a unique mode of defocused attention. However, this argument needs to be supported by experimental evidence based on attentional performance. The present study used a perceptual load paradigm, combining factors of perceptual load, distractor-target compatibility, and eccentricity, to investigate the degree of attentional distraction in depressed mood. In addition, the mode of attentional distraction associated with depressed mood was explored with the time-frequency features of electroencephalography (EEG). The behavioral results showed that the high depressed mood (HD) group had significantly higher attentional distraction than the low depressed mood (LD) group. EEG results showed that 1) the beta power (especially beta-2, 18-30 Hz) of the two groups differed in the medio-late part of the attentional distraction, with significantly lower power in the HD group than in the LD group; 2) the results of the correlation between beta-2 power and depression scores revealed a significant negative correlation. These results imply that beta-2 is a potential marker that may be sensitive to depressed mood during attentional processing, which was further supported by the classification results of the support vector machine (SVM) with 80.65% accuracy between the HD and LD groups.