Aim: To investigate the results of social cognition tests on young adults with either recurrent or nonrecurrent depression. This study tested three hypotheses: (1) young adults with recurrent depressive episodes (>2 episodes) would perform significantly poorer on social cognition tasks than nonrecurrent depression (1 or 2 episodes only); (2) deficits in negatively balanced prosody would be associated with deficits in other cognitive tasks due to the requirement of extra cognitive resources; and (3) anxiety severity not depression severity would be a predictor of recurrent depression. Design: Cross-sectional design with purposive sampling. Purposive sampling was used to target young adults who had experienced a depressive episode.
Method: Eighty-four young adults (M=21.69 years, SD=4.14; 61 females, 23 males) with recurrent depression (>2 major depressive episodes) and 36 young adults (M=20.03 years, SD=3.23; 29 females, 7 males) with non-recurrent depression (1 or 2 major depressive episodes only) completed a cognitive battery and semi structured interviews including a clinical interview.
Results: The recurrent depression group performed significantly poorer than the non-recurrent group in prosody matching (p=.015), but not in facial affect (p=.365). By grouping individual prosodymatching items into happy, surprise, afraid, sad, angry, neutral, and sarcasm items it was found that the recurrent group performed significantly poorer than the non-recurrent group in sarcasm items (p=.004) only. As prosody matching did not correlate with depression severity (p=.292) or anxiety severity (p=.345), prosody may be a trait deficit. Using linear regression with bootstrapping negatively balanced prosody (sad, angry, surprised) was significantly predicted by the Nback (1) task (p=.005). A logistic regression model with bootstrapping was run to determine if sarcasm items would still be independently associated with recurrent depression when co-varied with age, depression severity, and anxiety severity. Age (p=.009) and sarcasm items (p=.035) were both independently associated while depression severity (p=.824) and anxiety severity (p=.100) were not. Therefore both anxiety and depression severity were not predictors of the recurrent depression group. Omitting "Age" from the logistic regression the significance of sarcasm items increased to p=.004.
Conclusion: Prosody matching (sarcasm items) a possible trait deficit may play a role in differentiating recurrent and non-recurrent depression
