Psychological Medicine, Page 1 of 11.
doi:10.1017/S0033291714002347
OR I G I N A L A R T I C L E
© Cambridge University Press 2014
Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in
depression: an fMRI study using the Ultimatum
Game
V. B. Gradin1,2*, A. Pérez1, J. A. MacFarlane3, I. Cavin3, G. Waiter4, J. Engelmann5, B. Dritschel6,
A. Pomi7, K. Matthews2 and J. D. Steele2
1
CIBPsi, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay
Division of Neuroscience, Medical Research Institute, University of Dundee, UK
3
Medical Physics, NHS Tayside, University of Dundee, UK
4
Aberdeen Biomedical Imaging Centre, University of Aberdeen, UK
5
Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Switzerland
6
Department of Psychology, University of St Andrews, UK
7
Biophysics Section, Faculty of Sciences, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay
2
Background. Depression is a prevalent disorder that significantly affects the social functioning and interpersonal relationships of individuals. This highlights the need for investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying these social difficulties. Investigation of social exchanges has traditionally been challenging as such interactions are difficult to quantify.
Recently, however, neuroeconomic approaches that combine multiplayer behavioural economic paradigms and neuroimaging have provided a framework to operationalize and quantify the study of social interactions and the associated
neural substrates.
Method. We investigated brain activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in unmedicated depressed participants (n = 25) and matched healthy controls (n = 25). During scanning, participants played a behavioural
economic paradigm, the Ultimatum Game (UG). In this task, participants accept or reject monetary offers from other
players.
Results. In comparison to controls, depressed participants reported decreased levels of happiness in response to ‘fair’
offers. With increasing fairness of offers, controls activated the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal caudate, regions
that have been reported to process social information and responses to rewards. By contrast, participants with depression
failed to activate these regions with increasing fairness, with the lack of nucleus accumbens activation correlating with
increased anhedonia symptoms. Depressed participants also showed a diminished response to increasing unfairness of
offers in the medial occipital lobe.
Conclusions. Our findings suggest that depressed individuals differ from healthy controls in the neural substrates
involved with processing social information. In depression, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal caudate may underlie abnormalities in processing information linked to the fairness and rewarding aspects of other people’s decisions.
Received 14 May 2014; Revised 25 August 2014; Accepted 26 August 2014
Key words: Depression, functional magnetic resonance imaging, neuroeconomics, social interactions, ultimatum game.
Introduction
Major depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide and a major contributor to the
global burden of disease (Mathers & Loncar, 2006).
Depression has a particular impact on social functioning and interpersonal relationships (Papakostas et al.
2004), is associated with significant social impairment
(Kessler et al. 2003) and accounts for a 2–3-fold
* Address for correspondence: Dr V. B. Gradin, Faculty of
Psychology, Centre for Investigation of Basic Psychology (CIBPsi),
Universidad de la República, Montevideo 11200, Uruguay.
(Email: victoriagradin@gmail.com)
increased risk of onset of social disability (Ormel
et al. 1999). Compared to healthy people, depressed
individuals report poor intimate relationships, less
supportive social networks, less active social lives
and more negative, disharmonious and unsatisfactory
social interactions (Brugha et al. 1982; Billings et al.
1983; Fredman et al. 1988; Hirschfeld et al. 2000;
Zlotnick et al. 2000). This highlights the importance
of investigating the neural substrates of social information processing in depression.
Most neuroimaging studies of social cognition in depression have examined the neural correlates of facial
emotional perception (Cusi et al. 2012). Although
these tasks involve emotion recognition, they do not
2 V. B. Gradin et al.
involve interactive scenarios such as occur in social
exchanges. In the past few years, economics, psychology and neuroscience have converged into a new
discipline referred to as neuroeconomics (Glimcher &
Rustichini, 2004). The aim of neuroeconomics is to provide a theory of human behaviour revealing the neurobiological substrates that mediate decision making
(Glimcher & Rustichini, 2004). Within neuroeconomics,
social interactions have begun to be examined with
a combination of methods: for example, neuroimaging
and game theory. Game theory consists of quantitative
modelling of the behaviour of interacting ‘agents’
(Lee, 2008). Several popular neuroeconomics tasks
have been studied in healthy humans, allowing the
systematic, controlled examination of social concepts,
such as fairness, cooperation, trust and punishment
(Fehr & Schmidt, 1999). Importantly, neuroeconomic
approaches have been proposed as a promising framework for studying interpersonal functioning in psychiatric disorders (King-Casas & Chiu, 2012).
One of the most extensively studied game theory
paradigms is the Ultimatum Game (UG; Guth et al.
1982). The UG allows investigation of behavioural
and neural responses to fair and unfair social situations. In the UG, the participant (‘responder’) receives
offers from other players (‘proposers’) on how to split a
sum of money. In the ‘single-shot’ UG, on every trial
the proposer is a different person. The participant’s
task is to accept or reject the offer. If the participant
accepts the offer, the money is split between the two
players as proposed. If the participant rejects the
offer, both participant and proposer keep zero from
that trial. The optimal economic solution to the UG is
for the responder to accept any offer, on the grounds
that any monetary amount is preferable to none.
However, it is well replicated in healthy subjects that
low offers (less than 20–30% of the total amount)
tend to be rejected (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999). This is
thought to relate to participants objecting to ‘unfairness’ (Sanfey et al. 2003). Imaging studies on healthy
subjects have reported that brain regions related to
processing aversive emotional information (anterior
insula), cognitive conflict (dorsal anterior cingulate
cortex) and cognitive control (dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex) activate in response to unfair offers (Sanfey
et al. 2003). By contrast, fair offers have been shown
to activate reward-linked brain regions such as the
striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
(vmPFC) (Tabibnia et al. 2008; Crockett et al. 2013).
In the current study we used functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) and the UG to investigate
neural responses to social fairness and inequality in
unmedicated depressed participants and healthy controls. The main hypothesis was that depressed participants would show diminished responses to increasing
fairness in reward-linked brain regions such as the
striatum. This was based on two lines of evidence.
First, it has been shown in healthy subjects that striatal
regions respond to social concepts such as fairness and
trust (King-Casas et al. 2005; Tabibnia et al. 2008;
Crockett et al. 2013). Second, there are replicated
reports that depression is associated with reduced activation in the striatum in response to rewards (Eshel &
Roiser, 2010; Gradin et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2013). In
addition, we hypothesized that depressed participants
may show an increased response to social inequality
in the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate, as a study
on healthy subjects reported that sad mood induction
can potentiate neural responses to unfairness in these
regions (Harle et al. 2012).
Method
Participants
The study was approved by the local Research Ethics
Committee and written informed consent was
obtained from all participants. Data were acquired
from a group of 25 participants meeting criteria for
an episode of DSM-IV depression and from a group
of 25 healthy controls. The study was advertised within the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews, UK.
Potential participants were invited to apply for either
the depression or the control group. Applicants were
invited to a recruitment session (approximately 3–7
days before scanning) where they were screened for
depression and other psychiatric symptoms using the
Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI)
Plus version 5.0 and the rating scale for depressive
symptoms, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck
et al. 1961). Inclusion criteria for the depression group
were: satisfying DSM-IV criteria for a major depressive
disorder plus a score 416 on the BDI and at least 3
weeks of not taking antidepressant medication. The requirement of being medication free was included to
avoid a potential medication confound. Eleven depressed participants had never taken antidepressants,
eight had discontinued use at least 1 year before and
six had stopped at least 3 months before the study.
Participants in the control group had no current or
past history of depression or any other psychiatric disorder. Exclusion criteria for both groups were any
neurological disorder and contraindication for fMRI.
Two control data sets were excluded from all analyses,
one because of a hardware failure during data acquisition and the other because of failure to believe in
the UG ‘cover story’ (see paradigm description).
Details of the study participants are presented in
Table 1. Participants in the depression and control
groups were matched on the basis of gender, age,
Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in depression 3
Table 1. Participant details
n
Female/male
Age (years)
NART
Years of education
BDI
HAMD
MADRS
HAM-A
STAI Anxiety
RSES
PANAS positive affect
PANAS negative affect
SHAPS
SAS sociotropy
SAS autonomy
PSI sociotropy
PSI autonomy
CTQ
IIP
Control
Depression
25
17/8
25.44 ± 5.02
123.76 ± 2.82
16.52 ± 3.02
0.40 ± 0.76
0.16 ± 0.47
0.48 ± 0.82
0.44 ± 0.71
25.60 ± 3.79
25.40 ± 3.48
38.96 ± 4.29
11.92 ± 2.40
4.12 ± 3.40
57.92 ± 11.79
66.88 ± 13.49
82.32 ± 15.21
73.56 ± 16.12
5.68 ± 0.96
54.84 ± 28.16
25
17/8
25.48 ± 5.52
124.28 ± 2.05
17.26 ± 2.93
28.80 ± 9.06
12.44 ± 4.23
20.80 ± 6.97
9.28 ± 4.17
48.48 ± 10.62
9.20 ± 3.82
18.24 ± 4.78
25.64 ± 6.43
20.12 ± 4.53
80.56 ± 17.76
67.16 ± 14.54
104.84 ± 15.36
94.56 ± 10.95
9.67 ± 2.75
110.36 ± 27.31
Significance
p valuea
N.S.
0.98, N.S.
0.46, N.S.
0.38, N.S.
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.90, N.S.
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
NART, National Adult Reading Test; BDI, Beck Depression Inventory; HAMD/A, Hamilton Depression/Anxiety Rating
Scale; MADRS, Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale; RSES, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale; PANAS, Positive and
Negative Affect Schedule; SHAPS, Snaith–Hamilton Pleasure Scale; SAS, Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale; PSI, Personal Style
Inventory; CTQ, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire; IIP, Inventory of Interpersonal Problems; N.S., no significant difference between groups.
a
p values of the independent-samples t test.
Values are mean±standard deviation.
years of education and estimated pre-morbid IQ according to the National Adult Reading Test (NART;
Nelson & Wilson, 1991).
Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein
et al. 2003) and the Inventory of Interpersonal
Problems (IIP; Horowitz et al. 1993).
Clinical ratings
Paradigm
Participants were assessed for symptom severity immediately prior to scanning. All subjects completed
the BDI (Beck et al. 1961), the Hamilton Depression/
Anxiety Rating Scale (HAMD/A; Hamilton, 1959,
1960), the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating
Scale (MADRS; Montgomery & Asberg, 1979), the
Stait-Anxiety scale of the Spielberger State–Trait
Anxiety Inventory (STAI Form Y-1; Spielberger,
1983), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES;
Rosenberg, 1965), the Positive and Negative Affect
Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al. 1988) and the
Snaith–Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS; Snaith et al.
1995). Additionally, between the recruitment and scanning sessions, participants completed the Sociotropy
Autonomy Scale (SAS; Beck et al. 1983), the Personal
Style Inventory (PSI; Robins et al. 1994), the
During scanning participants performed the UG
task (Fig. 1a). Before scanning, participants were
instructed on how to play the UG in the responder
role. Participants were told that during the game
they would be presented with offers made by other
players (with each player making only one offer)
with regard to a split of a given amount of money.
Participants had to accept or reject the offers. If they accepted, the money would be divided as proposed. In
the case of rejection, both players would receive nothing on that trial. To ensure that participants would experience the game as ‘real’ social interactions, they
were told that they would be playing with real people.
In reality, the offers were preprogrammed. Participants
were told that some of the offers were being made by
players connected through a computer network while
4 V. B. Gradin et al.
Fig. 1. Experimental task, behavioural and emotional results. (a) Experimental task. On each trial participants are presented
with the initials of a co-player. Subsequently, participants are presented with the co-player’s offer. Participants are given up to
8 s to accept or reject the offer by pressing either the Yes or the No button. The duration of each screen is shown in seconds.
rt, reaction time. (b) Happiness rating. For fair offers depressed participants reported significantly lower levels of happiness
than controls. Error bars denote standard deviations and the asterisk indicates a significant difference. (c) Rejection rate. Both
controls and depressed participants rejected significantly more unfair offers than fair offers with no significant differences
between groups. Error bars denote standard deviations.
other offers had been previously made by other proposers and added to the paradigm (it would not have
been believable that a large number of participants
were involved in the game simultaneously). This deception was necessary to deliver a controlled task to
each participant while ensuring the ecological validity
of the task. Participants were told that at the end of the
game they would be paid a percentage of the money
they had accumulated during the game and that the
other players would also be paid according to their
earnings.
The set of offers was composed of ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’
offers. Fair offers were defined as a proportion from
0.38 to 0.50 of the endowment whereas unfair offers
spanned a proportion range from 0.08 to 0.33 of the endowment (Crockett et al. 2008; Wright et al. 2011).
Importantly, fair and unfair offers were matched for
material payoff. This means that the same amount
offered to the participant could represent a large percentage of the stake size during a fair offer and a
small percentage on an unfair offer. This allows investigation of the brain responses to fairness while
controlling for material value (Tabibnia et al. 2008).
Participants played two sessions of the UG in the
scanner, each session lasting about 11 min. Each
session contained 28 trials of each condition (fair,
Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in depression 5
unfair). The sequence of trial types and inter-trial
timing variation (‘jitter’) was determined using the
Optseq (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/optseq/)
algorithm, designed to optimize detection of the neural
signals of interest.
After scanning, participants rated their emotional reaction to a subset of fair and a subset of unfair offers.
The subsets contained four offers each and were
matched for material utility (this means that participants were offered the same amounts on each subset
of offers). For each offer, participants rated the following feelings on nine-point Likert scales: happy, angry,
sad and betrayed.
After the experiment was completed, participants
were debriefed regarding the cover story aspect of
the task. Only subjects who believed the cover story
were included in the analysis (one control participant
was excluded). No participants reported negative feelings regarding the deception. After playing the UG,
participants played the Prisoner’s Dilemma paradigm
in the scanner, the results of which will be reported
elsewhere. Participants were paid according to their
earnings in both games with an average of £17.
Neuroimaging analysis
For blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) response
imaging, T2*-weighted gradient echo planar images
were obtained using a 3-T Siemens Magnetom Tim
Trio MRI scanner with a 12-channel head coil. A total
of 37 sequential slices of thickness 3.5 mm and slice
gap 0.5 mm were obtained for each volume. To minimize the susceptibility artefact, slice orientation was
initially orientated parallel to the anterior commissure–posterior commissure (AC–PC) line, then
rotated 30° towards the coronal plane for scanning.
Two hundred and seventy-five volumes were obtained
with a repetition time (TR) of 2.5 s, echo time (TE) 30
ms, flip angle 90°, field of view (FOV) 224 mm and
matrix 64 × 64. The first four volumes were discarded
to allow for scanner transient effects.
SPM8 (www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm) was used for
analyses. The first image from each session was
aligned to the first scan of the first session. Then the
images from each session were aligned to the first
image of the session. The average realigned image
was used to derive parameters for spatial normalization to the SPM8 Montreal Neurological Institute
(MNI) template with the parameters applied to each
image in the time series. The resultant time series realigned and spatially normalized images were
smoothed with an 8-mm full-width at half-maximum
(FWHM) Gaussian kernel.
For the first-level analysis, an event-related design
was implemented with the onset of the offer modelled
as delta functions as implemented in SPM. This regressor was parametrically modulated by two orthogonalized regressors, the first being the offer ‘magnitude’
and the second the offer ‘fairness’ (i.e. the proportion
of the stake that is offered to the participant). This design allowed testing for brain responses to fairness,
controlling for offer magnitude. Six head motion realignment parameter estimates were included as covariates of no interest. Regressors of interest were
convolved with the SPM8 haemodynamic response
function without time or dispersion derivatives. Beta
images of regressors of interest were taken to
second-level analyses and within- and between-group
activations examined using one-sample and twosample t tests.
We investigated whether brain abnormalities
observed in the depression group correlated with the
BDI depression severity scores and with core symptoms
of depression such as anhedonia, measured using the
SHAPS (Snaith et al. 1995). This analysis was limited to
the regions that exhibited abnormalities on betweengroup comparisons. The dependent variable in this
analysis was the mean value of the parameter estimates
across voxels within a sphere of diameter 10 mm,
centred at the maximum peak coordinates of the regions
that showed between-group differences.
Unless stated otherwise, all analysis regions are
reported as significant at a whole-brain p < 0.05 cluster
level. This was achieved by a simultaneous requirement for a voxel threshold of p < 0.005 and a minimum
cluster size of 92 continuous voxels. These parameters
were identified using a Monte Carlo method that simulates whole-brain fMRI activation, assumes a type I
error voxel activation based on the voxel threshold,
smoothes the volume with a Gaussian kernel, then
counts the number of voxel clusters of a given size.
After running a number of iterations, the algorithm calculates a probability associated with each cluster extent, and the cluster extent threshold that yields the
desired correction for multiple comparisons can be
chosen (Slotnick et al. 2003). This algorithm was run assuming a smoothness corresponding to a 9-mm
FWHM Gaussian kernel (estimated using code available at www2.bc.edu/~slotnics/scripts.htm for the calculation of spatial autocorrelation) and 1000 iterations.
Results
Clinical ratings
Mean rating scale scores for each group are shown in
Table 1. As expected, between-group t tests identified
significant group differences, with participants in the
depression group scoring higher in depression (BDI,
HAMD, MADRS), higher in anxiety (HAMA, STAI
6 V. B. Gradin et al.
Anxiety), lower in self-esteem (RSES), lower in positive
affect and higher in negative affect (PANAS), and higher
in anhedonia (SHAPS) than controls. Participants in the
depression group scored significantly higher in ‘sociotropy’ (interpersonal style characterized by an intense
need for positive social interactions) in the SAS and
PSI, and higher in ‘autonomy’ (personality style characterized by a strong need to preserve independence) in
the PSI, than controls. The CTQ scores indicated significantly higher reporting of child abuse and neglect in the
depression group. Importantly, depressed participants
scored significantly higher than controls in the IIP.
This suggests more salient interpersonal difficulties in
the depression group, consistent with the hypothesis of
depression being associated with difficulties in social
interactions (see Table 1 for details).
Emotional responses
After scanning, participants rated their subjective
emotional reaction to fair and unfair offers (Table S1
in the online Supplementary material). For the emotion
of happiness, a mixed ANOVA identified a significant
main effect of fairness (F1,46 = 154, p < 0.001), with fair
offers eliciting more happiness than unfair offers, and
a significant main effect of group (F1,46 = 9.29, p =
0.004), with depressed participants reporting less happiness than controls. The interaction term was also
significant (F1,46 = 3.94, p = 0.05). Examination of simple
effects indicated that this interaction was driven by depressed volunteers reporting less happiness than controls for fair offers (p < 0.001) but not differing from
controls for unfair offers (Fig. 1b). For the other emotions there was a significant main effect of fairness in
all cases (anger, F1,46 = 65.63, p < 0.001; sadness, F1,46 =
47.69, p < 0.001; betrayal, F1,46 = 49.95, p < 0.001), with
unfair offers eliciting more negative emotions than
fair offers, whereas there was no significant effect of
group or interaction.
Behavioural analyses
A mixed ANOVA identified a significant effect of fairness (F1,46 = 190, p < 0.001) on the number of offers
rejected, with unfair offers showing a higher rejection
rate than fair offers, as expected. There was no significant effect of group or fairness × group interaction
(Fig. 1c, online Supplementary Table S1). Regarding reaction times (online Supplementary Table S1), there
was a significant effect of fairness (F1,46 = 31.89, p <
0.001), with fair offers triggering faster responses
than unfair offers, consistent with previous studies of
the UG (Crockett et al. 2013). There was no significant
effect of group or fairness × group interaction on reaction times. Depressed participants and controls did
not differ on their earnings during the UG (t46 = 1.38,
p = 0.18).
Neuroimaging analyses
Within- and between-group activations
With increasing fairness (decreasing inequality), controls
activated the vmPFC and a cluster extending through
the nucleus accumbens and dorsal caudate (Fig. 2a).
Participants with depression also activated the vmPFC
but failed to activate the striatal cluster (Fig. 2b). This
was the basis of a significant between-group difference
in the nucleus accumbens [(−2, 8, −4), t = 4.61] and
in the bilateral dorsal caudate [(−6, 18, 4), t = 3.42;
(4, 20, 6), t = 3.47], with controls showing stronger activations for increasing fairness of offers than depressed participants in these regions (Fig. 2c, d) (Supplementary
Tables S2–S4).
For the opposite contrast, increasing inequality
(decreasing fairness), both controls (Fig. 3a) and depressed participants (Fig. 3b) activated the dorsal anterior cingulate and the insula, consistent with
previous findings (Sanfey et al. 2003). Controls also
showed activation in a bilateral region in the medial
occipital cortex whereas the depression group did
not. A significant between-group difference was present in the medial occipital cortex bilaterally [(−28,
−64, 10), t = 3.65; (22, −64, 24), t = 4.14]. In these
regions, controls exhibited stronger activation for
increasing inequality than depressed participants
(Fig. 3c).
Correlational analysis
In the nucleus accumbens region, where depressed
participants differed from controls in the betweengroup analysis, brain activity in response to increasing
fairness correlated negatively with the anhedonia
symptoms for the depression group (r25 = −0.39, p =
0.05) (Fig. 2e). This means that the more anhedonic
the depressed participant was, the lower the nucleus
accumbens response to increasing fairness of offers.
In the left medial occipital lobe region, where the depression group differed from controls, the response
to increasing inequality correlated negatively with
the BDI scores for the depression group (r25 = −0.54,
p = 0.005) (Fig. 3d). This indicates that reduced
responses to increasing inequality in the medial occipital lobe were associated with increased severity of depressive symptoms. No other correlations were found
to be significant. As depressed participants and controls differed on their happiness ratings for fair offers,
using a post-hoc analysis we tested for correlations between brain activity and these ratings. No significant
correlation was found.
Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in depression 7
Fig. 2. Neural responses to increasing offer fairness. Neural responses to increasing fairness in (a) controls and (b) the
depression group. (c) Controls exhibited greater activation than depressed participants in response to increasing fairness in the
nucleus accumbens (NA) and dorsal caudate (DC). (d) Mean value of parameter estimates across voxels within a sphere of
diameter 10 mm, centred at peak coordinates (−2, 8, −4) of the NA and (−6, 18, 4)/(4, 20, 6) of the left/right DC regions
where depressed participants differed significantly from controls. Error bars denote standard error of the mean. (e) Correlation
with anhedonia symptoms for the NA region where depressed participants differed from controls. The dependent variable is
the mean value of parameter estimates for increasing fairness across voxels within a sphere of diameter 10 mm, centred at
peak coordinates (−2, 8, −4). Images displayed at p < 0.005 with a cluster extent threshold of 92 resampled voxels. vmPFC,
ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Discussion
This study investigated how depression modulates
brain activity associated with social interactions using
the UG. Although controls responded to increasing fairness with increasing activation of the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum, depressed participants
failed to show this pattern. Several studies have implicated the ventral striatum in the processing of social information. Consistent with our study, two previous
imaging studies in healthy subjects using the UG task
showed activation in the ventral striatum in response
to fairness after controlling for material value
(Tabibnia et al. 2008; Crockett et al. 2013). Another
study using a different social task (Tricomi et al. 2010)
has also shown that the ventral striatum encodes fairness preferences. Therefore, our finding of blunted ventral striatum activation in depression in response to
fairness suggests an abnormality in this population in
encoding the fairness of other people’s decisions.
Participants with depression also differed from controls in brain activation in the dorsal caudate. In this
region, controls showed activation in response to
8 V. B. Gradin et al.
Fig. 3. Neural responses to increasing offer inequality Brain regions active in response to increasing inequality in (a) controls
and (b) the depression group. (c) Controls exhibited greater activation than depressed participants in the medial occipital lobe
in response to increasing inequality. (d) Correlation with depression symptoms for the left medial occipital lobe region where
depressed participants differed from controls. The dependent variable is the mean value of parameter estimates for increasing
inequality across voxels within a sphere of diameter 10 mm, centred at peak coordinates (−28, −64, 10). Images displayed at
p < 0.005 with a cluster extent threshold of 92 resampled voxels. dACC, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; In, insula; mocc,
medial occipital cortex.
increasing fairness while depressed participants did
not. Importantly, in addition to the ventral striatum,
the dorsal caudate has also been implicated in social information processing (King-Casas et al. 2005). Using a
different game paradigm, the ‘Trust Game’, King-Casas
and colleagues found an increased response in the dorsal
caudate during ‘benevolent reciprocity’ relative to ‘malevolent reciprocity’. The authors suggested that the dorsal caudate processes information related to the fairness
of a social partner’s decision. Thus, the findings from
King-Casas et al. give further support to the proposal
that the dorsal caudate abnormality identified in the
present study relates to abnormal processing of social
fairness information in depression.
Assuming that increasingly fair offers from a
co-player can be seen as a social reward, the ventral
and dorsal striatal activation in controls is consistent
with studies reporting the involvement of these regions
in reward processing (O’Doherty et al. 2004; Tricomi
et al. 2004; Delgado et al. 2005; Pizzagalli et al. 2009).
In turn, the reduced striatal response to fairness in
the depression group is consistent with studies reporting reduced striatal activation in response to rewarding
events in this population (Eshel & Roiser, 2010; Gradin
et al. 2011). The current study therefore contributes to
this literature reporting that striatal abnormalities in
depression extend to social rewards.
Cognitive models of depression (Beck, 1979) posit
that depressed thinking is characterized by biases in
the processing of information, with depressed individuals selectively attending to and encoding negative
events, filtering out positive information (Disner et al.
2011). This process may decrease experience of positive
emotions during a pleasurable event, a phenomenon
sometimes referred to as positive blockade (Disner
et al. 2011). In agreement with this view, in the present
study depressed participants reported decreased levels
of happiness in response to fair offers. The observed abnormal striatal response to fairness in depression may
represent a neural mechanism underlying deficient
Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in depression 9
processing of rewarding social information. Consistent
with this, in the nucleus accumbens of depressed participants decreased responses to increasing fairness of
offers correlated with increased severity of anhedonia
symptoms. This suggests that a blunted nucleus accumbens response to positive social interactions may contribute to the typical anhedonia symptoms of
depression. It is possible that the striatal abnormality
in depressed participants also relates to the low selfreport levels of happiness in response to fair offers;
however, a correlation was not found.
Brain activity in participants with depression also
differed from controls in the medial occipital lobe. In
this region, controls showed stronger activation for increasing inequality than depressed participants. In the
depression group, this abnormality correlated with
increased severity of depressive symptoms suggesting
an illness effect. It has recently been reported that
patients with schizophrenia show abnormal activation
in occipital lobe regions associated with early visual
processing of social information, which may contribute
to higher-order social cognitive deficits in schizophrenia
(Bjorkquist & Herbener, 2013). It is therefore possible
that the occipital lobe abnormality in the present
study may reflect a similar abnormality in depression,
with regard to the early stages of processing social
information. In particular, it could suggest an effect of
attentional disengagement with aversive social cues,
although depressed participants showed similar activations in response to unfairness (i.e. activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate and insula) to those reported in
previous studies of the UG in non-depressed subjects
(Sanfey et al. 2003). Further work is needed to clarify
the implications of the medial occipital lobe finding.
Although the findings in the striatum are in agreement
with our predictions, we did not find evidence for an
increased response to inequality in depression, in regions
such as the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate, which
have been reported to have enhanced activation in
response to unfairness during the induction of sad
mood in healthy subjects (Harle et al. 2012). This may
be due to sad mood induction in healthy subjects engaging different brain mechanisms than depressed mood.
Alternatively, recruitment of more severely depressed
patients might allow identification of inequality linked
abnormalities in the insula and dorsal anterior cingulate.
Although the image analyses identified neural differences between depressed participants and controls,
the behavioural analyses did not detect between-group
differences in rejection rates during the UG. Previous
behavioural studies have used the UG to investigate
decision making in the context of depression. Overall,
results have been inconsistent, with studies reporting
increased, decreased or unchanged rejection rates to
unfair offers in depressed populations (Harle et al.
2010; Destoop et al. 2012; Scheele et al. 2013). One
study reported that depressed patients rejected significantly more unfair offers than controls, possibly due to
an enhanced negative emotional response to unfairness
in depression (Scheele et al. 2013). By contrast, another
study found that whereas depressed participants
reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair
offers, they accepted more unfair offers than controls
(Harle et al. 2010). Similarly, it has been observed
that anxious patients accept significantly more unfair
offers than controls (Grecucci et al. 2013). One proposed explanation for this set of results is that a heightened need for positive social interactions, difficulties
in the management of interpersonal confrontation
and low assertiveness may lead people with depression and/or anxiety to less rejection in the UG
paradigm (Grecucci et al. 2013). Finally, one study
found no significant difference in rejection rates
between depressed patients and healthy controls during the UG (Destoop et al. 2012), as in our study.
Overall, these findings show that the effect of mood
on UG decision making can be complex. Future studies
could investigate whether depression subtypes show
more consistent behaviour patterns during the UG.
Possible limitations of the study include recruitment
of a university sample, which may limit the generalizability of the results. However, this recruitment method
was chosen to facilitate recruitment of unmedicated participants, avoiding a possible medication confound.
In summary, using a neuroeconomic approach, this
study investigated the hypothesis that unmedicated,
depressed participants would differ from healthy controls in the neural processing of social interactions.
Importantly, depressed participants reported experiencing lower levels of happiness during fair offers
and exhibited diminished activation in the nucleus
accumbens and dorsal caudate in response to increasing fairness of offers, with the abnormality in the nucleus accumbens correlating with increased levels of
anhedonia. These findings suggest that the nucleus
accumbens and the dorsal caudate may be linked to
impairments in experiencing positive social interactions in depression. This could reflect part of the neural
substrates of the social withdrawal and interpersonal
difficulties that are characteristic of this population.
Supplementary material
For supplementary material accompanying this paper
visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714002347.
Acknowledgements
We thank C. Matthews, M. Stirling, C. Adams and
F. Grant for their support with obtaining ethics
10 V. B. Gradin et al.
approval, the recruitment and data management. We
also thank the staff from the Advanced Intervention
Service (AIS) for valuable discussions regarding the
study design. Finally, we thank all the participants in
this study. This study was funded by the University
of Dundee, the Scottish Mental Health Research
Network, Dr Kathleen White’s Clinical Neuroscience
Research Endowment Fund and a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Agency for Investigation and
Innovation (ANII), Uruguay to V.B.G. The funding
sources had no role in the design and conduct of the
study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; and preparation, review, or approval
of the manuscript.
Declaration of Interest
K.M. has chaired advisory boards for studies of deep
brain stimulation for obsessive–compulsive disorder
sponsored by Medtronic. He has received educational
grants from Cyberonics Inc. and Schering-Plough,
and research project funding from Merck Serono,
Reckitt Benckiser, Lundbeck and St Jude Medical. He
has received travel and accommodation support to attend meetings from Medtronic and St Jude Medical. J.
D.S. has received research funding through an honorarium associated with a lecture from Wyeth and an unrestricted educational grant from Schering-Plough.
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