Neural, Behavioral, and Speech Indicators of Mood-Congruent Bias in Major Depressive Disorder

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Authors: Julia Schräder^1,2, Rebecca Sieberg¹, Felix Menne³, Felix Dörr³, Johannes Tröger³, Ute Habel^1,4, Alexandra König^3,5, Lisa Wagels^1,2

_{^{1 Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Faculty of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
2 JARA-Translational Brain Medicine, Aachen, Germany
3 ki:elements GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany
4 Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, JARA-Institute Brain Structure Function Relationship (INM 10), Research Center Jülich, Jülich, Germany
5 Université Côte d'Azur, Centre Hospitalier et Universitaire, Clinique Gériatrique du Cerveau et du Mouvement, Centre Mémoire de Ressources et de Recherche, Nice, France}}

Published as a preprint in PsychArchives on May 7, 2025.
DOI: 10.23668/psycharchives.16330

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Abstract

Aim: Investigating the neural, behavioral, and speech markers of mood-congruent bias in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and its relationship with cognitive control deficits.

Method: Participants (n = 126; 60 MDD, 66 controls) underwent an fMRI video task with subliminally presented happy/sad facial expressions (16.7 ms) that were either congruent or incongruent with video emotion content. Additionally, participants completed storytelling tasks (positive/negative events) with speech recordings and psychological assessments outside the scanner.

Results: Participants detected emotions more accurately and quickly when videos and subliminal primes were congruent. MDD patients performed worse overall, especially when happy videos were paired with sad primes. fMRI revealed increased activation in right inferior and middle occipital and temporal gyri in MDD. Speech–psychological interactions did not significantly differ by group.

Conclusion: Neuroimaging suggests compensatory mechanisms in MDD through increased cognitive effort in emotional processing. Through this multimodal approach, the study highlights intertwined emotional and cognitive dynamics that may perpetuate mood-congruent biases and depression severity.

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Repository Structure

• data/ – Behavioral data, speech feature datasets, and psychological assessments
• scripts/ – Analysis code for fMRI data, speech processing, statistical models

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Citation

If you use or reference this repository, please cite the preprint:

@article{Schraeder2025MoodBias,
  title   = {Neural, Behavioral, and Speech Indicators of Mood-Congruent Bias in Major Depressive Disorder},
  author  = {Schräder, Julia and Sieberg, Rebecca and Menne, Felix and Dörr, Felix and Tröger, Johannes and Habel, Ute and König, Alexandra and Wagels, Lisa},
  year    = {2025},
  journal = {PsychArchives},
  doi     = {10.23668/psycharchives.16330}
}