The Effects of Depression on The Neural Correlates of Reward Sensitivity in Poverty

Existing studies have identified that depression and depressive symptoms are associated with reduced sensitivity to feedback processing, which is a core ability that determines the success of human actions. However, a key individual difference which is the socioeconomic status (SES) has been largely ignored in this field because the recent trend of research has suggested how it relates to various cognitive domain-specific neural systems. Because depression is a widespread mental health condition that is more prevalent among the poor, it can potentially play a role in the association between poverty and feedback processing. With a sample of 80 adults recruited from low to high-income communities, the current study examined the role of depression on the relationship between poverty and feedback processing by using feedback negativity (FN) event-related potential (ERP), which is a well-known ERP component that is indexed by response feedback indicating losses versus gains. Consistent with previous studies, high depressive symptoms were associated with reduced FN amplitude across our sample. SES was negatively associated with FN and depressive symptoms, which indicates reduced reward sensitivity to feedback among the low-SES individuals who are also mostly depressed. However, no association between SES and reward sensitivity was observed when it was controlled for depression. Findings in this study suggest the importance of partial out the variance accounted for by depression when studying responses to reward sensitivity in poverty.