Depressed children do not have a good holiday season and are not fond of gifts, according to the results of a study published in the medical journal Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Researchers at the University of Washington in the United States conducted a study with 84 children, part of a larger research on clinical depression in children aged 3 to 7 years.
Depression, the number one disease in teens
Depressed children react poorly to reward
The children wore a device that measures electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG). Participants played a computer game that involved choosing between two doors shown on the screen. Choosing one of the doors earned them points, while the other resulted in a loss of points.
The researchers observed that the brains of clinically depressed children responded in the same way as those of non-depressed children when stitches were lost, but did not show great satisfaction in gaining points.
“A poor response to reward is often seen in the brains of depressed adults and adolescents,” explained first author Andrew C. Belden, assistant professor of child psychiatry. “In this study, we wanted to know if preschoolers also had this poor response to reward, and in fact, the brains of children as young as 4 years old showed very similar responses.”
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