Depression
Title
Depression
Author
Gotlib, Ian H.
Furman, Daniella J.
Research Area
Psychopathology
Topic
Mental Disorder Varieties
Abstract
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a costly, prevalent, and recurrent psychiatric disorder that can involve significant impairment across multiple domains of functioning. In this essay, we provide an overview of the theory and research associating aberrant information processing and neural structure and function with the etiology and maintenance of MDD. We begin by highlighting the foundational work that characterizes depressed persons' cognitive and neural responses to valenced stimuli. We then examine recent efforts to clarify the nature of the temporal relation between depression and these cognitive and neural anomalies, focusing on research designed to identify abnormalities that are present before the onset on MDD and to examine the consequences of manipulating cognitive and neural anomalies. Finally, we describe several areas and questions to be examined in future research that we believe will lead both to a more comprehensive psychobiological understanding of MDD and to improvements in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of this disorder. In particular, we focus on the need for innovation in diagnosis, better characterization of symptom heterogeneity in MDD, on extending neural research in MDD to the study of abnormalities in larger‐scale brain networks, and on elucidating the mechanisms that underlie the successful effects of training programs designed to reduce cognitive biases in depression.