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Abstract

About 17% of humanity goes through an episode of major depression at some point in their lifetime. Despite the enormous societal costs of this incapacitating disorder, it is largely unknown how the likelihood of falling into a depressive episode can be assessed. Here, we show for a large group of healthy individuals and patients that the probability of an upcoming shift between a depressed and a normal state is related to elevated temporal autocorrelation, variance, and correlation between emotions in fluctuations of autorecorded emotions. These are indicators of the general phenomenon of critical slowing down, which is expected to occur when a system approaches a tipping point. Our results support the hypothesis that mood may have alternative stable states separated by tipping points, and suggest an approach for assessing the likelihood of transitions into and out of depression.

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Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.

James A. Russell (2003)

At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states--called core affect--influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.

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Early warnings of regime shifts: a whole-ecosystem experiment.

S. R. Carpenter, J. J. Cole, M. L. Pace … (2011)

Catastrophic ecological regime shifts may be announced in advance by statistical early warning signals such as slowing return rates from perturbation and rising variance. The theoretical background for these indicators is rich, but real-world tests are rare, especially for whole ecosystems. We tested the hypothesis that these statistics would be early warning signals for an experimentally induced regime shift in an aquatic food web. We gradually added top predators to a lake over 3 years to destabilize its food web. An adjacent lake was monitored simultaneously as a reference ecosystem. Warning signals of a regime shift were evident in the manipulated lake during reorganization of the food web more than a year before the food web transition was complete, corroborating theory for leading indicators of ecological regime shifts.

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Rising variance: a leading indicator of ecological transition.

S. R. Carpenter, W. Brock (2006)

Regime shifts are substantial, long-lasting reorganizations of complex systems, such as ecosystems. Large ecosystem changes such as eutrophication, shifts among vegetation types, degradation of coral reefs and regional climate change often come as surprises because we lack leading indicators for regime shifts. Increases in variability of ecosystems have been suggested to foreshadow ecological regime shifts. However, it may be difficult to discern variability due to impending regime shift from that of exogenous drivers that affect the ecosystem. We addressed this problem using a model of lake eutrophication. Lakes are subject to fluctuations in recycling associated with regime shifts, as well as fluctuating nutrient inputs. Despite the complications of noisy inputs, increasing variability of lake-water phosphorus was discernible prior to the shift to eutrophic conditions. Simulations show that rising standard deviation (SD) could signal impending shifts about a decade in advance. The rising SD was detected by studying variability around predictions of a simple time-series model, and did not depend on detailed knowledge of the actual ecosystem dynamics.

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PubMed ID:: 24324144

PMC ID:: 3890822

DOI:: 10.1073/pnas.1312114110

ScienceOpen disciplines: Chemistry

Keywords: Adolescent,Adult,Affect,Aged,Algorithms,Depressive Disorder, Major,diagnosis,physiopathology,therapy,Emotions,Female,Humans,Male,Middle Aged,Models, Psychological,Multivariate Analysis,Questionnaires,Stochastic Processes,Time Factors,Twin Studies as Topic,Young Adult

Critical slowing down as early warning for the onset and termination of depression.

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Neuropharmacology and Therapy

Most cited references 20

Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.

Early warnings of regime shifts: a whole-ecosystem experiment.

Rising variance: a leading indicator of ecological transition.

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