Emmy Noether Group for Experimental Research on Depression
Research
Every person holds certain beliefs about themselves, their environment, and the future. Decades of research have shown that in depression, such beliefs are shaped negatively, such as “I’m a failure”, “People cannot be trusted”, and “Nothing good will happen to me”. However, recent research has suggested a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, it is not so much the content of beliefs that is aberrant in depression, but the inability to abandon negative beliefs. That is, most non-depressed people occasionally also have negative beliefs, but usually they revise such beliefs when receiving new information that contradicts them in a positive way, referred to as belief updating (see Figure 1). People with depression, however, often fail to update negative beliefs despite positive disconfirming experiences. In some way, this failure to update negative beliefs in response to novel positive information appears surprising because negative beliefs are usually associated with negative feelings (e.g., feeling upset) and negative behavioural consequences (e.g., withdrawing from other people). So, the thorny question is: why do people with depression hold on to beliefs that both are often disconfirmed through real experiences and make them feel bad?
In our Emmy Noether research group, we address this question in three lines of research. In the first research line, we seek to better understand the nature and specificity of biased belief updating in depression. To this end, we will compare the update of beliefs in people with depression with clinical control participants and healthy control participants in a variety of experimental tasks using different methodological approaches (i.e., behavioural assessments, eye tracking). In the second research line, we examine the causal role of biased belief updating in the context of depressive symptoms. In particular, in at-risk samples with elevated levels of depression, we investigate whether the degree of belief updating can be modulated and whether such a modulation longitudinally leads to changes in depressive symptoms. Finally, in the third line of research, we test the clinical impact of biased belief updating in depression by investigating whether deficits in integrating novel positive experiences is a predictor of poor symptom improvement in the acute phase of cognitive-behavioural treatment for depression. Furthermore, we will apply the insights from our experimental approaches in psychotherapeutic interventions (e.g., behavioural experiments) to test whether their efficacy can be enhanced.
Understanding the deficits of patients with depression in belief updating is vital to comprehend how they construct and maintain their mental reality. If difficulties with integrating novel positive experiences proved to be predictive of poor response to psychotherapeutic treatment, it would point to the potential of modifying biases in belief updating at the beginning of psychotherapy. This would ensure that patients can adaptively process potentially positive learning experiences they are going to make in psychotherapy. Thus, the ultimate goal of our research group is to identify targets for improving the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatment of depression.