The role of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on voluntary forgetting of negative social feedback in depressed patients: A TMS study

doi:10.3724/SP.J.1041.2021.01094

Abstract

Abstract:

The negative mood of depressed patients may result from their inhibition dysfunction. When patients voluntarily forget negative materials, they cannot effectively recruit the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and other frontal brain networks responsible for inhibition control. At the same time, patients have more obvious cognitive neurological barriers in the processing of social information than non-social information and have deficits in voluntary forgetting of social feedback information that is unfavorable to them. To improve the ability to voluntarily forget negative social feedback, we employed transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to activate the left DLPFC (n = 32) or the right DLPFC (n = 30) and examined the change of memory control ability for depressed patients. Results showed that the recall accuracy of social rejection was no significant difference between patients and healthy controls (n = 31) after we used the TMS to activate the left or right DLPFC of patients and activation of the right DLPFC also improved patients’ social attitude towards others. The main contribution of this study is the first attempt to improve the ability of depressed patients in voluntary forgetting by employing TMS. We not only demonstrated a causal relationship between the DLPFC and memory control function but provided a specific neural target for the clinical treatment of memory control deficits in patients with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug addiction.

Key words: depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, voluntary forget, social feedback, negative memory, directed forgetting

CHEN Yuming, LI Sijin, GUO Tianyou, XIE Hui, XU Feng, ZHANG Dandan. (2021). The role of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on voluntary forgetting of negative social feedback in depressed patients: A TMS study. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 53(10), 1094-1104.

Figures/Tables 4

Table 1 Demographical characteristics of the four groups (M ± SD)

Variable	The left DLPFC-activated patient group (n = 32)	The right DLPFC-activated patient group (n = 30)	TMS patient control group (n = 30)	The healthy control group (n = 31)
Age	29.21 ± 2.54	29.27 ± 2.92	28.88 ± 3.14	28.42 ± 2.48
gender (female/male)	18/14	17/13	17/13	17/14
Years of education	15.50 ± 3.28	14.37 ± 2.29	14.23 ± 3.04	13.83 ± 3.72
Rejection sensitivity	9.07 ± 3.24	9.01 ± 3.12	8.64 ± 3.72	7.33 ± 2.50
Depressive symptoms	23.52 ± 6.87	22.43 ± 4.72	23.04 ± 5.13	1.88 ± 1.82

Figure 1. Experimental procedure. A, Experimental task flow chart. Each participant received TMS stimulation for 10 min: from 3 min before the beginning of TMS task phase to the end of directed forgetting task. B, Illustration of one trial in the directed forgetting task. Due to copyright, the person in the sample photo was replaced by a member of our research group.

Figure 2. Illustration of TMS electric field. There were four groups: the two experimental groups of patients activated the left and right DLPFC respectively, the TMS control group of patients activated the vertex, and the healthy control group activated the right DLPFC. The colors represent normalized current field strength, with blue representing zero and red representing the maximum. The images were created by the software SimNIBS (www.SimNIBS.org).

Figure 3. Experimental results. AB, The recall accuracy of negative social feedback. CD, The face attractiveness score (1 for the lowest attractiveness and 9 for the highest attractiveness). AC was a comparison “based on between groups”, and BD was a comparison “based on TMS effects within groups”. Bars represented standard error of the mean. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. In this figure, the data of the four groups of participants were shown in different colors (see digital color map): the healthy control group is white and gray, the left DLPFC-activited patient group is light blue and dark blue, the right DLPFC-activited patient group is light green and dark green, and the TMS patient control group is light red and dark red.

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