When people are depressed, they're less likely to experience joy, excitement, alertness and other positive emotions. That makes sense intuitively, and indeed a large body of research shows depression is correlated with so-called low positive affect. But little attention has been paid to how that association holds up from culture to culture, says Karen C. Pang, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington.
So Pang decided to focus on the cultural connection in her dissertation research. In 2013, she was awarded the American Psychological Foundation/Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology Clarence J. Rosencrans Scholarship for her project exploring some of the differences between white and Asian-American teenagers experiencing depression.
Previous research has suggested that Asians and Asian-Americans with depression may be less likely to express low positive affect, she says. But most of the evidence stems from self-reports. Pang wanted to dig deeper.
She recruited 18- and 19-year-old white and Asian participants with a range of depression severity. In the first phase of her study, she administered questionnaires to assess aspects of mental health, such as depression, as well as measures of positive affect and cultural variables, such as acculturation. Then, with a subset of her original sample, she conducted clinical interviews and measured positive affect and reward processing with EEG.
The results are still preliminary, Pang says, but some patterns are emerging. In the first phase of the study, she found a negative correlation between positive affect and depression for both white and Asian teenagers. But, consistent with previous research, that negative correlation was weaker for Asian participants.
Pang is still analyzing the EEG data, but she says that so far, the neural signatures of the depressed teenagers in her sample don't seem to differ by ethnicity. "Physiologically, there may not be as drastic a difference across races as there is in self-reports," she says. In other words, Asian-Americans may not exhibit outward signs of low positive affect, even though they are depressed. And that could have implications for how depression is diagnosed.
"What a person might report on a questionnaire or circle on a survey might be largely influenced by their cultural backgrounds and cultural norms," Pang says. "It's important to understand where a person is coming from."
Pang says the Rosencrans scholarship was essential to making her dissertation project a reality. She used the grant to recruit and compensate her study participants. "Without the award, I wouldn't have been able to follow through," she says.
In July, Pang began her internship at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. After her internship year is complete, she hopes to return to research — and she's already thinking of possible next steps. She'd like to repeat her EEG study with a more clinically impaired population, she says, since the range of depression severity in her study wasn't as wide as she'd hoped. She's also interested in exploring differences among Asian subgroups.
"I love my clinical work, but I still believe that continuing with this research will have the greatest effect in the long run," she says. "I want to form a more culturally sensitive model of depression."
