Depression and event-related potentials: emotional disengagement and reward insensitivity

•Event-related potentials (ERPs) can be used to understand core deficits in major depressive disorder (MDD) and risk.•Depression and risk for depression are associated with decreased ERP response to emotional stimuli.•Depression and risk for depression are associated with decreased neural response to monetary gain versus loss.•ERP work suggests emotional and motivational disengagement as core features of depression and risk.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide economical neural indices of information-processing abnormalities in relation to depression and depression risk. Early ERP studies of depression focused on cognitive deficits, more recent studies have examined ERPs to emotionally and motivationally relevant stimuli. Both the late positive potential (LPP), a measure of sustained processing of motivationally salient stimuli, and the reward positivity (RewP), an index of reactivity to receipt of reward, appear to be diminished in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and depressive symptoms, suggesting that depression is associated with emotional disengagement and deficits in reward processing.