Abstract

Depression and suicidality are associated with systematic alterations in cognitive and emotional processing, yet the spatiotemporal neural dynamics underlying these changes during affective task engagement remain poorly characterized. We investigate the time-resolved neural representations of affective semantic processing using multivariate decoding of 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG), while participants (N = 137) perform Sentence Evaluation task using emotionally salient, self-referential statements. Reliable condition-dependent neural discriminability emerges with peak decoding accuracy between 300-600 ms, a time window corresponding to affective semantic evaluation, contextual updating processes, and conflict monitoring. Relative to healthy controls, individuals with depression and suicidal ideation show earlier onset, longer duration, and greater amplitude decoding responses, along with …

Date

2026

Authors

Woojae Jeong, Aditya Kommineni, Kleanthis Avramidis, Colin McDaniel, Donald Berry, Myzelle Hughes, Thomas McGee, Elsi Kaiser, Dani Byrd, Assal Habibi, B Rael Cahn, Idan A Blank, Kristina Lerman, Dimitrios Pantazis, Sudarsana R Kadiri, Takfarinas Medani, Shrikanth Narayanan, Richard M Leahy

Journal

Communications Biology

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group UK