Decoding Emotion: Speech Perception Patterns in Individuals with Self-reported Depression
This research addresses the problem of understanding emotional processing in individuals with depression, but it is incremental as it replicates prior work with a specific population and yields mostly null results.
The study investigated whether self-reported depression affects emotional speech perception in an Indian population, finding no significant differences between depression and no-depression groups for most emotional stimuli, except neutral emotion, and no reduction in positive emotional reactivity as previously reported.
The current study examines the relationship between self-reported depression and the perception of affective speech within the Indian population. PANAS and PHQ-9 were used to assess current mood and depression, respectively. Participants' emotional reactivity was recorded on a valence and arousal scale against the affective speech audio presented in a sequence. No significant differences between the depression and no-depression groups were observed for any of the emotional stimuli, except the audio file depicting neutral emotion. Significantly higher PANAS scores by the depression than the no-depression group indicate the impact of pre-disposed mood on the current mood status. Contrary to previous findings, this study did not observe reduced positive emotional reactivity by the depression group. However, the results demonstrated consistency in emotional reactivity for speech stimuli depicting sadness and anger across all measures of emotion perception.