Automatic Emotion Regulation Of Adolescent Depression:an ERP Study

Adolescence is a critical period of whole life development.During this period the structure and function of the brain have undergone great changes.With these changes,the cognitive and emotional dysfunctions have often appeared.Compared with children and adults,adolescents show a stronger emotional sensitivity.Depression in adolescence is a harbinger of adult depression and is slow and easy to relapse with nearly seventy percent likely to recur in the later years of life.Emotion dysregulation is one of core characteristics of adolescent depression,so to strengthen the research of emotion regulation in adolescent depression will better help understanding the emotional development depression in adolescence,which is very important for the treatment of adolescent depression.In recent years,many researchers have studied emotion regulation in adolescent depression.The most have focused on intended emotion regulation but neglected automatic emotion regulation.Since the abilities in emotion regulation depends on the automatic emotion regulation function,the intervention of adolescent depression must first restore automatic emotion regulation function.Therefore,it is necessary to understand the mechanism of automatic emotion regulation in adolescent depression.This research adopts the implicit emotional GO/NOGO paradigm to study electrophysiological characteristics of automatic emotion regulation in normal and depressive adolescents using ERP(event related potential)technology.In the process of experiment,E-prime synchronously recorded the behavior data of two groups of subjects.After the experiment,they fill in several questionnaires.This research mainly includes three parts.Chapter 3 used implicit GO/NOGO paradigm to study ERP differences of automatic emotion regulation in the normal and depressive groups.Chapter 4 used ACS(the Attentional Control Scale)and IPPA(the Iventory of Parent and Peer Attachment)to investigate their relationships with adolescent depressive measures.Chapter 5 investigated the relationship between behavioral measures and ERP components related to automatic emotion regulation in adolescents.The results showed that:(1)In the GO/NOGO paradigm with clued emotional faces,there were differences in GO N2(related to top-down attention)and NOGO P3(related to automatic response inhibition)between the normal and depressive groups.(2)Attention control is an important factor affecting implicit emotion regulation.Attention control scores in normal adolescents were significantly greater relative to depressive adolescents.Depressive symptoms in adolescents increased with the decrease in attention control scores.Moreover,attachment level in normal adolescents was significantly higher than that in depressive adolescents.There was an anticorrelationship between attachment level and depressive symptoms.(3)Attention control had a negative association with GO N2 amplitudes and attachment level had a negative association with NOGO P3 amplitudes.In summary,these observations suggest that the deficits in automatic attention control and automatic response inhibition occur in adolescent depression.Peer attachment might have an important influence on automatic emotion regulation in adolescent depression.These results are very important for deepening us to understand the neural mechanism of automatic emotion regulation in adolescent depression.