Author's response to commentary 'Depressive symptomatology should be systematically controlled for in neuroticism research'

Abstract

In the commentary by Bianchi and Laurent (2015), the authors suggest that depressive symptoms should be controlled for when examining the neurobiology associated with trait neuroticism. We fully agree that the relation between neuroticism and symptoms of stress-related psychiatric disorders, such as major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, should not be overlooked when studying its neural correlates. However, instead of treating this relation as a potential confound, we consider it to be of particular importance to include depressive symptoms when studying the influence of acute psychological stress on neural mechanisms related to trait neuroticism. Regardless of this principal disagreement, we also confirmed empirically that depression scores did not affect our voxel-wise results. In sum, our results were not confounded by depression scores and more importantly, our study question and design do not warrant including depression scores in our analysis.

Keywords: Amygdala; Depression; Neuroticism; Stress; fMRI.