RESUMEN
Objective To investigate effects of three kinds of neutral,happy,sad emotional faces stimulus on sustained attention task using N170 in depression patients to analysis the correlation of depression in patients with depression,anxiety severity and the amplitude and latency of N170.Methods Twenty-eight patients with depression aged from 22 to 69 years (case group),and 31 healthy controls (control group) aged from 20 to 61 years were recruited for the study.Subjects were asked to perform tasks in the selection of attention following randomly presented three kinds of happy,neutral and sad emotional faces stimuli.Brain auditory evoked potential including N170 amplitude and latency were recorded during the tasks.HAMD and HAMA were used to assess the severity of depression and anxiety.Results There was significant difference between case group and control group in N170 latency by three kinds of happy,neutral and sad emotional faces stimulation in the local skull (T5,T6,O1,O2) (P＜0.05).But the difference was not significant in N170 amplitude (P＞0.05).The total score of HAMD in case group had a positive correlation with N170 amplitude by neutral facial emotion stimulation in part of T5 (r=0.443,P=0.018).Conclusion There is significant change in the initial cognitive processing of different emotional faces in the patients with depression.And the severity of depression is related to the N170 amplitude induced by the neutral emotional faces stimulation in some parts of brain.