Cortical functional mechanisms in emotional cognitive tasks in first-episode, drug-naïve with major depressive disorder: A fNIRS study

Previous research has revealed that patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have negative biases in various aspects of information processing, and these biases are mainly manifested in recognizing facial expressions. However, the link between this emotional cognitive inhibition and neural activation mechanisms in cortical brain regions remains poorly understood. Therefore, this study employed functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the potential impaired regions and neural mechanisms associated with facial emotion cognition in MDD patients.