Depression is a widespread chronic medical illness that can affect thoughts, mood, and physical health. It is characterized by low mood, lack of energy, sadness, insomnia, and an inability to enjoy life. However, so far clinical studies have shown that patients with depression do not have a satisfactory therapeutic outcome. Therefore, based on recent studies, in this special issue these special...

BACKGROUND Affective disorders are associated with comorbidity of depression and anxiety symptoms. Positron emission tomography resting-state studies in affective disorders have generally failed to isolate specific symptom effects. Emotion provocation studies in healthy volunteers have produced variable results, due to differences in experimental paradigm and instructions. METHODS To better d...

This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of depression in nursing staff working in Intensive Care Units of hospitals from a city in Northwestern São Paulo State - Brazil, examining its association with participants' socio-demographic characteristics. The Beck Depression Inventory was applied to a sample of 67 nursing workers from three general hospitals, showing an 28.4% prevalence of depres...

Depression is a common underdiagnosed, undertreated and costly mood disorder associated with substantial morbidity and mortality (1-3). It is related to the emotion of sadness or irritability and accompanied by several psycophysiological changes, such as disturbances in sleep, appetite or sexual desire; constipation; loss of the ability to experience pleasure in work or with friends; crying; su...

Sadness is an emotion universally recognized across cultures, suggesting it plays an important functional role in regulating human behavior. Numerous adaptive explanations of persistent sadness interfering with daily functioning (hereafter "depression") have been proposed, but most do not explain frequent bidirectional associations between depression and greater immune activation. Here we test ...

In research it has been demonstrated that cognitive and interpersonal processes play significant roles in depression development and persistence. The judgment of emotions displayed in facial expressions by depressed patients allows for a better understanding of these processes. In this study, 48 major depression outpatients and healthy control subjects, matched on the gender of the patients, ju...

Depression has a variety of symptoms, but the most common are a deep feeling of sadness or a marked loss of interest or pleasure in activities. Other symptoms include: • Changes in appetite that result in weight losses or gains unrelated to dieting • Insomnia or oversleeping • Loss of energy or increased fatigue • Restlessness or irritability • Feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt •...

The serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) duloxetine is an effective treatment for major depression and generalised anxiety disorder. Neuropsychological models of antidepressant drug action suggest therapeutic effects might be mediated by the early correction of maladaptive biases in emotion processing, including the recognition of emotional expressions. Sub-chronic administration o...