The influence of depression on coping strategies in mental arithmetic stress

It is well known that the patients of depression have lower performance in perception, planning, and execution in cognition relative to healthy controls. It remains controversial, however, whether any differences in basic cognitive functions between depression and healthy subjects. Furthermore, few studies have directly used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural activation and deactivation differences between depression and healthy subjects while performing stressful cognitive tasks. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine possible differences in neural activation associated with mental arithmetic stress components in processing visuospatial information between depression and healthy subjects. To this end, we employed a Mental Arithmetic Task (MAT), which has a strong stress component. The results show that healthy subjects have stronger activation of pre-frontal cortex (BA9 / 6), dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus (BA32), the inferior parietal lobule (BA40) than depression subjects in tasks, while depression subjects have stronger activation of the right lateral prefrontal cortex (BA10), ventral anterior cingulate gyrus (BA24), the amygdala of limbic lobe, temporal lobe (BA21) and the lateral nucleus than healthy participants. Behavioral data showed that mathematics performance of healthy subjects is significantly better than that of depression subjects. The results show that the loops on regulation of attention and emotions are strengthened in healthy subjects during mental arithmetic task; and depression participants show the contrary mode that the control loops of attention and emotion are inhibited. This may be one reason for the difference of the mathematical abilities between depression and healthy subjects.