Depression Detection from Electroencephalogram Signals Induced by Affective Auditory Stimuli

Depression is a mental disorder characterized by emotional and cognitive dysfunction, which appears a state of low mood and aversion to activity. Depression can affect a person's thoughts, behavior, feelings, and sense of well-being. Depression is projected to be the second major life-threatening illness in 2020 by World Health Organization (WHO). Thus, it is urgent to detect and treat depression. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, which objectively reflect the working status of the human brain, are considered as promising physiological tools for depression detection. Negatively biased processing of affective stimuli in depression has been proven. In order to detect depression more effectively, we proposed an affective auditory stimuli induced depression detection method from EEG signals. In this method, we applied negative, positive and neutral affective auditory stimuli with several frequency selected from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2) to induce negative affective bias in patients with depression. We synchronously collected EEG signals with three electrodes located on the prefrontal lobe (Fpl, Fpz, and Fp2), then extracted efficacious features by Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based feature extraction method to detect depression effectively. The results of the proposed method showed that high-frequency affective auditory stimuli were more effective in depression detection and the frequency of affective auditory stimuli was a crucial property, which can influence the effectiveness of affective auditory stimuli in depression detection.