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Depression

Do people with depressive symptoms learn fear less well?

Luo RH, Su F, Zhao XY, et al. · Frontiers in psychology · 2024

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Students with mild-to-higher depressive symptoms did not show a learned fear response in their skin conductance, even though they reported knowing which shape predicted a shock.

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Study at a glance

Design
Human experiment — Within-subject differential Pavlovian fear conditioning (CS+ paired with shock on half its trials, CS- never) on day 1 and extinction 24 h later, comparing students split by Beck Depression Inventory score.
N
N=49 · 53 students enrolled; 4 excluded as skin-conductance non-responders, leaving 49 on day 1 and 44 on day 2. Group sizes after the BDI split are not stated directly.
Population
Healthy Chinese college students aged 18-30, split into those with (BDI > 4) and without (BDI <= 4) depressive symptoms
Outcome
Differential skin conductance response to CS+ vs CS- during acquisition and extinction; subjective US expectancy, nervousness and likeability ratings; fit of a hybrid associative-learning model

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Key findings

Students without depressive symptoms showed larger skin conductance responses to the CS+ than the CS- by the end of conditioning, and this difference reappeared early on day two before fading with extinction. Students with depressive symptoms showed no CS+/CS- difference in either phase, suggesting they never acquired the conditioned fear physiologically. Both groups nonetheless rated the CS+ as more shock-predicting and more nerve-racking, with no group differences in these ratings, and the model's associability tracked skin conductance strongly in the non-depressed group (r about 0.69) but not at all in the depressed-symptom group.

Methodology

College students first filled in questionnaires on depression, anxiety, childhood trauma, sleep and life events, and were split into groups with and without depressive symptoms using the Beck Depression Inventory. On day one they saw two shapes: one (CS+) was followed by a mild shock on half its presentations and the other (CS-) never was, while their skin conductance was recorded. The next day the shapes were shown without shocks to test fear recall and extinction, and a hybrid Rescorla-Wagner/Pearce-Hall learning model was fitted to each person's trial-by-trial responses.

Limitations

The 'depressive symptoms' group was defined by a very low cut-off on a short self-report scale in healthy students, so the findings may not apply to clinical depression. Group conclusions rest on separate within-group t-tests rather than a direct test that the CS+/CS- difference was larger in one group than the other, and the group sizes are modest. The depressed-symptom group also had higher anxiety, trauma and poor-sleep scores; the authors argue these were in the normal range, but the design cannot rule them out, and a general blunting of skin conductance (rather than impaired learning) could produce the same pattern.

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