The emotional adaptation aftereffect discriminates between individuals with high and low levels of depressive symptoms.

The adaptation aftereffect plays a critical role in human development and survival. Existing studies have found that, compared with general individuals, individuals with learning disability, autism and dyslexia show a smaller amount of non-affective-based cognitive adaptation aftereffect. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether individuals with depression or depression tendency show similar phenomenon in the adaptation aftereffect, and whether such depression tendency occurs in the non-affective-based cognitive or emotional adaptation aftereffect. To address this question, the present study conducted two experiments. Experiments 1A and 1B used the emotional facial expression adaptation paradigm to examine whether Chinese participants showed the emotional adaptation aftereffect and whether the emotional adaptation aftereffect was influenced by physical features of faces, respectively. Experiment 2 recruited two groups of participants, with high and low depression, respectively, to examine whether they showed differences in the emotional or cognitive adaptation aftereffect. Results showed that Chinese participants showed the typical emotional adaptation aftereffect, which was not influenced by physical features of faces. More importantly, compared to the low-depression group, the high-depression group showed a smaller emotional adaptation aftereffect, but the two groups showed a similar cognitive adaptation aftereffect. These results suggest that level of depressive symptoms is associated with the emotional adaptation aftereffect.