Abstract

Depression and suicidality affect cognitive and emotional processes, yet objective, task-evoked neural readouts of mental health remain limited. We investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of affective semantic processing using multivariate decoding of time-resolved, 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG). Participants (N=137) performed a sentence-evaluation task with emotionally salient, self-referential statements. We identified robust neural signatures of semantic processing, with peak decoding accuracy between 300-600 ms -- a window associated with rapid, stimulus-driven semantic evaluation and conflict monitoring. Relative to healthy controls, individuals with depression and suicidal ideation showed earlier onset, longer duration, and greater amplitude decoding responses, along with broader cross-temporal generalization and enhanced contributions from frontocentral and parietotemporal components. These findings suggest altered sensitivity and impaired disengagement from emotionally salient content in the clinical groups, advancing our understanding of the neurocognitive basis of mental health and establishing a compact and interpretable EEG-based index of semantic-evaluation dynamics with potential diagnostic relevance.

Date

July 30, 2025

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

arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22313