A negative emotional and economic judgment bias in major depression

Although major depression is projected to be among the top three causes of disability-adjusted life years lost in 2030, relatively little is known concerning the extent to which depressed mood states can bias social–economic decision making away from optimal outcomes. One experimental framework to study the interaction between negative emotion and social–economic decisions is the ultimatum game (UG), where the fair, cooperative player altruistically punishes the unfair, non-cooperative player. To assess a potential susceptibility of altruistic punishment to depressed mood, we repeatedly administered the UG task to a cohort of 20 currently depressed patients with a diagnosis of recurrent major depressive disorder and 20 healthy controls. Furthermore, valence and arousal ratings of emotionally laden pictures were obtained from all participants in order to assess a depressed mood-related distortion of emotion judgments. Compared to healthy controls, depressed patients over-sanctioned unfair proposals in the UG and judged emotional stimuli too negatively. Thus, major depression is associated with a negative emotional bias that hampers social–economic decision making and produces large personal costs.