Abstract #3280

Wokrina T, Ende G, Demirakca T, Herbert C, Kissler J, Wildgruber D

The primary objective of the presented fMRI study was to determine whether passively reading pleasant and unpleasant adjectives leads to mood congruent activation differences in depressed patients. Emotional adjectives compared to neutral words yielded significantly deminished hemodynamic responses within the bilateral inferior frontal cortex and the left superior frontal gyrus in depressed patients. Considering the different emotional aspects (pleasant, unpleasant) only the contrast unpleasant > neutral revealed a significant difference between patients and healthy controls. Patients exhibited a higher BOLD response in the right frontal pole of the temporal lobe. The valence specific differences might indicate different implicit verbal processing in patients.