Unconscious emotional conflict in major depressive disorder: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study

According to the cognitive model of depression, biased acquisition and evaluation of emotional infor-mation are the key elements for developing and maintaining depression (Beck, 1987). Maladaptive functions in depression are primarily explained by two mechanisms; i) hyperactive responses to nega-tive information initiate an emotional processing bias, even when the negative information has been unconsciously perceived, and ii) attenuated cognitive control impairs evaluation of the biased infor-mation (for an overview, see Disner et al., 2011). The present project aims to construct an empirical neural model that provides separate mechanisms in clinical depression by which i) emotion processing is biased at an unconscious level and ii) the resulting effects of unconscious processing are controlled on a conscious level.-masked emotional conflict task to a large sample of participants. A multimodal neuroimaging technique with EEG and fMRI is applied. Licence: CC-By Attribution 4.0 International