Social Dysfunction and Neural Processing of Emotional Valence Across Depressive and Anxiety Disorders

Social dysfunction is common across psychiatric disorders, including depressive and anxiety disorders. Both disorders have been associated with negative biases in socioaffective neural processing, which may impact responses to social stimuli. This study aims to determine whether social dysfunction across these psychiatric disorders is indeed coupled to altered neural processing of negative and positive valenced emotional stimuli and whether a common neurobiological correlate can be identified. An implicit emotional faces functional magnetic resonance imaging task was used to measure brain activation in response to emotional stimuli in participants with depression (N = 46), anxiety (N = 45), comorbid depressive and anxiety disorders (N = 57), and healthy controls (N = 52). Social dysfunction was indexed using five items of the World Health Organisation Disability Assessment Schedule-2.0 (i.e., perceived social disability) and with the De Jong-Gierveld Loneliness scale (LON; i.e., perceived loneliness). Higher perceived social disability scores were associated with greater brain activation in the left angular gyrus in response to sad emotional faces across all participants but did not correlate with responses to overall negative (sad, angry, and fearful) or positive (happy) emotional faces. No interaction effect of diagnosis was observed for the finding. Perceived loneliness scores did not correlate with brain activation to emotional faces. Taken together, perceived social disability across persons with and without depressive and/or anxiety disorders converges specifically on sad emotional processing of the left angular gyrus, suggesting a potential common neurobiological correlate for social dysfunction.