Immune Response in Major Depressive Disorder and Psychophysiological Correlates

This thesis aimed to examine connections between attentional bias to negative and neutral faces in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), stress and inflammation systems. Over three sessions control and MDD participants had biochemical, multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and behavioural data collected. The MDD group showed increased stress hormone and decreased serotonin concentrations, increased functional MRI brain response to sad faces, decreased early attention response to happy faces and decreased brain cell and energetic markers. Network analysis showed a highly connected network between measured variables for the MDD group, while controls showed a more disconnected network.