
Depressed children respond differently to rewards than other kids - devinp
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/8313.html
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gomijacogeo
“If they’re persistently sad, irritable or less motivated, those are markers
that may indicate depression, even in kids as young as 3 or 4, and we would
recommend that parents get them evaluated.”

Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms
of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in
denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.

~~~
jetpks
> Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying
> symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are
> neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help
> for their kid.

Depression definitely can be caused by abuse. In fact if you're being abused
you are probably also depressed.

Depression and other mental illnesses are also often caused by things that
can't be externally influenced at all.

Casually linking poor parenting with mental illness enforces a stigma that
discourages people from seeking treatment for themselves or for their
children.

~~~
dkersten
I didn't read GP as necessarily being about abuse, but even stuff like the
parents arguing in front of the child.

~~~
laumars
I didn't read GPs post that way either, however I still agree with jetpks'
point regarding depression. Mental illness is a medical condition so cannot be
dismissed as a parenting problem. While _some_ instances of depression will be
symptoms of a child's home life, others will be medical.

~~~
erelde
I don't understand how the parenting problem being the root cause of the
mental illness dismisses the mental illness.

Imagine if the child is sick (eg in pneumonia) it wouldn't dismiss the illness
if I explained how the child got sick because their parents left them outside
freezing.

It's not dismissing, it's analyzing the root cause, to try and help the child.
If something causes illness (mental and/or physical), we should take care of
both the illness and the cause.

In the case of depression, finding a true unique cause is still open for
debate/research, but it shoudn't prevent us from helping someone who's
depressed.

~~~
laumars
Depression is a vague overly-general term so it differs from person to person.
There isn't going to be a "true unique cause". In some instances it's just a
result of chemical imbalances rather than emotional conditioning from the
parents. Thus you cannot brush depression of as being environmental.

~~~
erelde
A _cause_ isn't necessarily environmental, it can be, and even if it is "a
result of chemical imbalances", there's still a cause, and if we could find
the causes for the multiple forms of mental illnesses wouldn't that be good?

~~~
speeder
What he is trying to get at, is that some mental illness are genetic, people
are born with them, and due to people frequently insisting that they are
always result of external factors, it leads to people that were born with
genetic problems to not get treated as parents either are ashamed or feel
insulted and refuse treatment.

(Disclaimer: this happened to me. I have confirmed ADHD and maybe aspergers
too, but my parents were so offended when schools asked them to take me to a
doctor that only now in my adulthood I am being treated properly)

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cairo_x
I can attest to this. Grew up with Bipolar II, and Christmas was always the
worst due to the dissonance of the joy around you and your own bad feelings.
Birthdays were worse, because then you couldn't escape the attention. I
specifically requested to stop having birthday parties -rather to just have a
small family dinner. I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was
moody/cynical.

I really wish I was diagnosed earlier, but what can you do? It breaks my heart
to think of any kid going through the same thing and it just being dismissed,
but what are they supposed to do? If you're going to get a proper diagnosis
you need a referral to see a psychiatrist. If you're a bit iffy and the doctor
doesn't think a referral is in order you're likely to wind up with a number of
wrong diagnoses. I don't think at that age I was even capable of explaining
all my symptoms thoroughly enough for even a psychiatrist to figure out the
whole picture.

This is why physical diagnoses _needs_ to step up to the plate. There needs to
be a blood test, or something like it, rather than having to rely on baffled
parents, or patients who might not even realize certain symptoms are even
worth bringing up at all.

~~~
Fnoord
According to Wikipedia, Bipolar II is hard to diagnose. A lot of personality
disorders also have an onset in late youth/early adulthood. IOW, you cannot
diagnose those yet at a pre-teen age.

There's a big taboo concerning depression. It isn't regarded as a disease, in
social life those who are negative tend to get avoided.

As for rewards like presents, I simply don't get the whole theatre behind it.
It is just trading, often nowhere near original, and I too often don't know
what on earth to buy for someone, ending up with cheesy things. You ask
something, and you either get exactly what you want (no surprise), you get
something you don't want and did not ask for (negative surprise) or you get
something you did not ask for and do want (positive surprise). Now, how to
make someone positively surprised if they already feel they got pretty much
everything? If the only things they do want are rather expensive? If they
don't need yet another cheap thing such as perfume while they already have
their own expensive perfume brand which bottle is not even half empty? My
point is that it can be extremely difficult to satisfy someone's needs. Not
merely mine; the ones of all my peers. Now consider I was like this as a child
as well (probably why I am like this now).

Perhaps therein lies the difference. The non depressed are happy to receive a
gift, never mind that it is merely a custom whereas the depressed see through
the custom. One could argue the latter is smarter, but is that true from a
biological PoV?

~~~
cairo_x
I grew up with pretty left wing parents who were against consumerism. I liked
the gifts and the principal of a fun pagan silly ritual where be re-express
our love for one another. I never felt displeasure with being given a gift in
my life. Guilt, maybe, that I couldn't show more pleasure in the situation,
but kids are pretty good at hiding their emotions. Sometimes the act drops,
and then observers just say you're having a bad day.

I find the idea that depressed people have a gift at seeing through fakery as
troubling. It is a correlation and causation thing. If I was depressed
everything seemed shit, even the stuff that wasn't fake, so of course it might
look enlightened in certain situations. I think a lot of those studies are
flawed pop-psychology type stuff that I wouldn't put much value in.

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wfunction
Hm, can someone help me figure out what this is saying more rigorously?

Specifically, is it saying Pr(Dislikes Rewards | Depressed) is high, or is it
saying Pr(Depressed | Dislikes Rewards) is high, or both?

~~~
dlss
The article doesn't say anything about Pr(Dislikes Rewards), but rather claims
to have measured P(Diminished Response to Rewards | Clinical Depression
Diagnosis) > P(Diminished Response to Rewards | !Diagnosis).

It's an 84 person study, done using EEG (a very rough measure of electrical
activity in the brain), claiming a result largely related neurotransmitter
release (ie not the sort of thing EEGs are usually used to measure). You
should take their claims with a huge helping of salt.

~~~
wfunction
Yeah my focus wasn't on the wording, it was on the order of the two variables.
Interesting, thanks.

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meriobrudar
Wait, so they had kids choose a door and there was a 50% chance they get a
point or lose a point? And that's what constitutes scientific research these
days?

Did they even account for the kids figuring out that whether they win or lose
is completely random and there's no skill or pattern involved? You know, like
"what's even the point of trying if it's all random anyway"? Maybe that's why
some kids weren't thrilled to get a point, because there was literally no
effort required to get it, pure chance.

I don't know what the "scientists" expected, but I don't know a single person
who goes into euphoria after they win a coin flip. Geez, they might all be at
risk of clinical depression!!!!!!!

~~~
matthewmacleod
Isn't it more likely that these scientists do actually know what they are
doing, and aren't actually the incompetent bumbling fools you seem to think?

I'm baffled that there is always a response to any scientific research along
the lines of "Well, these scientists didn't take <obvious confounding factor>
into account! They need to compensate for <list of random attributes I just
thought up>."

~~~
throwanem
Quite aside from the fact that appeal to authority is not how science is
_supposed_ to work, the current reproducibility crisis suggests that this sort
of response need not be as baffling as you seem to find it.

To be clear, I doubt GP has accurately identified a confounder here; the
comparison is between children diagnosed with depression and those not so
diagnosed, performing the same task, so it's not as though differential
response on the task is being used to identify depression. But the larger
point that a result need not be taken on faith remains valid, as does the
general advisability of knowing what you're talking about before you do so -
which GP regrettably seems here to have overlooked.

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tdkl
Or "depressed" children simply aren't smitten by simple artificial gifts.

~~~
AimHere
So what makes non-depressed kids more smitten? What's interesting is that
there is a differentiation between the two, not which is the 'right' way to
behave.

You can throw your own emotional spin on this phenomenon if you like, but the
scientist's job was to investigate whether there is a phenomenon of this sort,
and they did just that.

~~~
tdkl
> So what makes non-depressed kids more smitten?

That they're receptive to BS tests and more easily manipulated ?

> What's interesting is that there is a differentiation between the two, not
> which is the 'right' way to behave.

Interesting ? Of course there's a differentiation between the two, human
brains don't operate the same.

But my point was with the common popular notion of claiming someone as
depressed as something being notoriously bad with them and "not normal". What
if the 'depressive realism' (as mentioned in this thread) is actually a
feature that humans should develop to more rationally meet their choices in
life? Now that's a question I find more interesting.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Eeyore > Pooh.

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StClaire
Interesting. But isn't this almost the definition of depression?

~~~
wapz
I think a better take away is the reverse. If you are rewarding children in
your class (or your kids) and one is not enthusiastic then you should take
note there might be a problem (essentially the first sentence of the article).

~~~
douche
I'd be very careful here. Perhaps the particular reward is not perceived by
the child as a reward? I can think of any number of things that one party
might perceive as a reward that would be, to me, uncomfortable or meh.

~~~
jayajay
Interesting. Instead, kid enters the room, you tell them that they will be
sitting there anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours, depending on how long the
experiment should be. They get to choose a sequence of doors. At each step,
the door can either contain +10 minutes or -10 minutes, representing the
number of minutes which will be either added to or subtracted from their
experiment duration, respectively.

My guess is that the depressed/bored children will now respond a little bit
better to this experiment. It's just a guess -- but I think depressed/bored
kids would tend to avoid spending time being bored in a little lab room.

~~~
Symbiote
Depression has little to do with boredom.

I think a depressed person would be more likely to ignore all your doors, or
open a few without caring one way or the other. But I'm not a psychiatrist.

~~~
jayajay
> Depression has little to do with boredom.

This is not as well understood as we think. I would suggest doing that
experiment with both types of people, though.

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andrewclunn
Mrs. Berry was then left with the unpleasant realization that either her
entire class was depressed, or scratch and sniff stickers were no longer cool.

------
known
EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids
[http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_corte...](http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_cortex.shtml)

