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Volume 7, Issue 5 (Suppl) J Psychol Psychother, an open access journal
ISSN: 2161-0487 Psychosomatic Medicine & Forensic Congress 2017
October 12-14, 2017
JOINT EVENT
24th International Conference on PSYCHIATRY & PSYCHOSOMATIC MEDICINE
2nd International Congress on FORENSIC SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY
&
October 12-14, 2017 London, UK
Abnormal social interactive behavior in major depressive disorder
Yuan Zhou
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Statement of the Problem: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized with significant and pervasive impairments in social
functioning. Limited knowledge about social dysfunction in MDD results from traditional paradigms, which lack insights into
social interactions. Game theoretical modeling offers a new tool for investigating social interactive impairments in neuropsychiatric
disorders. Several studies have used an Ultimatum Game to study social interactive behavior as a responder in MDD and obtained
inconsistent findings. More importantly, it is unclear for the underpinnings of the abnormal behavior in MDD. We hypothesized that
sensitivity to context changes is abnormal in MDD patients during the Ultimatum Game.
Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: In order to test our hypothesis, we recruited 27 MDD patients and 28 matched healthy
controls to perform a classical Ultimatum Game as responders. During this game, an offer with fairness level from 4%-50% could be
proposed either by a human or by a computer.
Findings: We found that MDD patients showed decreased rejection rate for the unfair offers and increased rejection rate for the fair
offers. In addition, the patients were unable to discriminatively treat unfair offers from computer and from human proposers, unlike
the healthy control whose rejection rate for human proposer was higher than that for computer proposer. Furthermore, using binary
logistic regression modeling, we found that MDD patients showed decreased absolute values of both the slope and intercept across
human proposer condition and computer proposer condition (respectively, P=0.004 and P<0.001), suggesting that the influence of
fairness context on rejection rates was reduced in MDD patients.
Conclusion & Significance: MDD patients showed insensitivity to fairness context, which explained the pattern of lack of changes
towards fairness during the Ultimatum Game. These findings suggest that reward processing and prediction error in a social context
may be impaired in MDD patients.
Biography
Yuan Zhou received her MS in Psychiatry and Mental Health from Wuhan University in 2004 and her PhD in Pattern Recognition and Intelligence System
from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). She has been conducting research actively in neuroimaging and mental health, at first in
characterizing the brain network of schizophrenic patients using resting-state fMRI and then in investigating cognitive deficit in psychiatric disorders using task-
based fMRI. Recently, her research interest has focused specifically on understanding social decision making in patients with schizophrenia or major depressive
disorder and its underlying psychopathology and neural basis. She has published her work in international journals including Cerebral Cortex, NeuroImage,
Schizophrenia Bulletin, Schizophrenia Research, etc.
Yuan Zhou, J Psychol Psychother 2017, 7:5(Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2161-0487-C1-017