Decision-making in adult unipolar depressed patients and healthy subjects: significant differences in Net Score and in non-traditional alternative measures

Abstract

Alterations in executive functioning are frequent in depressive patients. One clinical characteristic of depression is difficulty and slowness in decision-making. This study aimed to compare the performance of a group of 30 non-psychotic unipolar depressed to 30 healthy controls in a version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) from the Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL). Significant differences between depressed patients and healthy controls in traditional Net Score measures as well as in various alternative metrics were verified.

Keywords

• Unipolar depression
• Iowa Gambling Task (IGT)
• Decision-making
• Normative data