02 ± 0.06) being lower than that of the healthy group (0.04 ± 0.08). The interaction between repayment proportion and group was also significant, F(2, 194) = 3.37, P= 0.04; post hoc results showed that patients with depression repaid a smaller ratio than healthy participants when the repayment proportion was low (R= 20%, MDD 0.03 ± 0.07 vs. controls 0.07 ± 0.11; F(1, 97) = 4.34, P= 0.04) or medium Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (R= 50%, MDD 0.02 ± 0.06 vs. controls

0.04 ± 0.07; F(1, 97) = 4.02, P= 0.048) (Fig. 1D). There was, however, no significant difference between both groups when the repayment proportion was high (R= 80%, P > 0.1). The interaction between risk and group was not significant (F < 1). Discussion We tested whether depressed people would make more deceptive or altruistic decisions in the modified trust game. The results support our hypotheses that people with depression would in fact make fewer altruistic and fewer deceptive responses. In this study, executing deceptive or altruistic Selleck ABT888 responses required Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical cognitive affective processing far more complex than that required for simply repaying the suggested Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical amount. For deceptive or altruistic responses, participants needed to consider the risk and payment conjunction

and then calculate the difference between the amount of actual repayment and the requested amount before making a decision. Therefore, cognitive load would be much higher if Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical they chose to cheat the investor or to repay an amount different from that of those recruited as reference. People with depression have been widely reported to have compromised cognitive and affective processing (Harvey et al. 2005; Ritchey et al. 2011). Thus, it is logical to reason that these people would simply adhere to the requested payment when preferring to be honest, choose the least Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical repayment when wanting to deceive, or repay as much as possible when deciding to respond altruistically, since other choices would tax their limited cognitive and affective resources. But if this were the case, we should

have found a larger ratio of either altruistic or deceptive choices in depressed patients. Instead, compared with healthy participants, people with depression made a smaller ratio of choices on both deceptive and altruistic decisions. The special behavioral patterns of Cediranib (AZD2171) the depressed patients in this study should therefore not have resulted from their limited cognitive or affective resources. Since the between-group difference was significant in some but not all conditions, this implies that depressed patients were responsive to the varying level of repayment proportion involved in the experiment. Compared with the healthy volunteers, the depressed patients made deceptive responses less frequently and by a smaller ratio only when the repayment proportion was high; they also made altruistic responses less frequently and by a smaller ratio only when the repayment proportion was medium or low.