The Neural Representation of Self in Depression Patients

The Different Neural Representation of Self in Depression Patients and Healthy Individuals.

To be aware of oneself as a unique entity in the world occurs early in human development and is the prerequisite of normal social functioning. The disturbance of self representation characterizes a variety of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Negative self-bias was found to serve as the core cognitive mechanism of depression disorder. However, there was no evidence to show the reason lead to negative bias. In the current study, investigators hypothesized that the blurring self representation was the neural correlates in depression disorder.

To test investigators' hypothesis, investigators adopted the self-referential task and fMRI to investigate the neural representation of self in depression patients, and compared with healthy control.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Patients should be clinical diagnosis of major depression disorder.
• Healthy control participants should be age-matched with depression group, and should have no history of neurological or psychiatric diagnoses

Exclusion Criteria:

• Patients who also have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder
• Healthy controls who have history of mental disorders