Research On The Effects Of Depression For College Students On Facial Processing

As a complex emotional experience,depression lasts longer and accompanies by great pain.The incidence of depression rises every year,so the United Nations Health Organization had predicted in early years that the depression will become the world’s second largest cause of death by 2020.The college students are always regarded as the hope of a country.They will meet more opportunities and challenges when they step into the society to begin their work.But on the other hand,they have to bear more mental stress and a greater risk of depression as a result.Previous studies indicated that depression may cause a lot of symptoms,a series of psychological and physical symptoms and cognitive and executive disorders as a result of the changing of brain structure.Some scholars use event-related potential to study the process of face treatment in depressed patients.They found that the patients with depression have self-cognitive abnormalities,and have negative repression to the emotions face.The brain function study based on electroencephalogram found that depressive patients have abnormalities in functional brain network connection and the network efficiency decreased.A study of normal people shows that there is a difference in the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces,and they will lead to different ERP components.Compared with unfamiliar face,the familiar face will activate more brain areas.The researches about face processing in depressed patients are mainly focused on the emotional face processing at present,not the familiar face processing.Therefore,this study is significant.The depressive college students group and the normal control group are compared in our research,using ERP technology and Phase Locking Value method to explore the impact of depression on face processing about colleague.First,we used questionnaires(Beck Depression Rating Scale II,State-Trait Anxiety Inventory,Experiences in Close Relationships Inventory)to screen for depression in college and to understand the effects of depression on anxiety and attachment.Second,to explore the neurophysiological characteristics of depressive patients by analyzing the difference of ERP components produced during the face processing of parents and unfamiliar men and women.Last,by analyzing the functional brain network connectivity and the difference of their clustering coefficient and the mean shortest path on face processing of mother,friends and strange peers,we aim to understand the abnormalities of the functional brain network connectivity in patients with depression.We found that during the process of different familiarity face processing,the ERP components amplitude come from the depressive college students are reduced,and the brain network of them has changed.The brain network connectivity of college students in depression group has deteriorated.These findings provide a basis for understanding the effects of depression on the electrophysiological effects of college students.It can also help teachers and parents to recognize the seriousness of depression in college students and to increase the necessary care and help for this particular group.