Depressed children respond differently to rewards than other kids

Ok, so in your claimed expert opinion, depressed kids are depressed because of the parents actions; and their parents won't ever give a shit. But so what? Why write that?

The folks doing this research know more than you do about the causes of their depression; and they know more than you do about the difficulties in addressing any causes. But unlike you, instead of implying that they're foolish for trying to make the world better, they're just trying to make the world better.

Most victories are long, hard slogs. I respect people who undertake those slogs, knowing that victory is not assured. I have no respect for those who throw rocks at them.

> Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home

That isn't always true. Some people are depressed without an external cause.

It's easier if there is an external cause: Fix the cause, fix the depression.

Depression is caused by more than just external events. Yes, based on personal experience, but there are more factors to be considered and fixing one issue may not solve the problem.

"Rather, depression has many possible causes, including faulty mood regulation by the brain, genetic vulnerability, stressful life events, medications, and medical problems."[0](https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-dep...)

Fine. A more reasoned response might be to assert that in at least some cases, young children exhibiting signs of depression are reacting to severe problems at home. In those cases, expecting the parents to pursue treatment for the child might be overly optimistic. It might have been nice if the article had mentioned that as a potential complicating factor and how other, less immediate family or friends might notice these signs and find ways to facilitate some kind of evaluation or intervention. How's that?

Your take that depression is caused by bad home circumstances is true for some cases, but there are many causes for depression in between, most of them not even close to being understood. Genetics, immune disease, thyroid problems, etc. The list is pretty huge.

As for expecting parents to notice; a trained psychiatric professional cannot diagnose depression by regular life observation alone. They rely on self reporting, or suicide attempts. Anything less than that is extremely hard to pick up on.

> 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.

There is also genetic factor. Infant depression can happen in a perfectly fine family. Of course if parents don't know how to deal with this problem it will get worse. Education helps.

Nevermind you have elaborated your point in the new comments.

> I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was moody/cynical.

> 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.

And that's relying on the parents to even be looking for issues in their offspring. If they're narcissistic, the child could go undiagnosed.

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?

My birthday is always the worst day of the year. Of course, it's also in the depths of March, when it's freezing cold, icy, and dark. But it's also a silly custom that everyone else gets much too excited about, and so the disconnect between their expectations of my emotions and my lack of emotion about it is somewhat painful.

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.

The first one. They sorted the kids into Depressed and not-Depressed before measuring the reward response.

The second probability depends on the relative sizes of all four quadrants and your definition of "high". The truth of statement one does imply that it's higher, but how much higher is not discussed.

Nice statistical property: this is the same thing.

P(B|A)>P(B) <=> P(A|B)>P(A)

Well obedient consumers should behave like that.

Also did you check lately, maybe you're clinically depressed considering your lack of enthusiasm of the evalution method. /s

So you're saying you didn't read the article then. Or you don't believe that gambling excites people. I look forward to your scientific paper where you try to reproduce the result.

I don't have a reference offhand, but there's research that indicates that depressed people have more realistic outlooks on life, as contrasted with 'normal' people who are hopelessly optimistic. Maybe the depressed kids figured out quicker that the whole study was pointless?

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>."

>Although still analogous to “gambling” tasks used with older samples, the modified version uses varying level of prizes (e.g., poor prize = a single yellow pencil; a great prize = a doll o r nerf toys) instead of the typical monetary incentives. That is, young children do not have a c lear conception of money and its relative quantities; however, at very young ages, children r eactive positively to prizes and gifts. Prior to the task, children were shown 3 boxes of toys: each box had increasingly appealing toys (e.g., least appealing box included standard pencils, and the most appealing box included toys such as dolls and nerf toys). Children were told that wh en they guessed the correct door, they would see a green up arrow, and if they guessed the wrong door, they would see a red arrow pointing down. The experimenter explained that the box of to ys the children could pick from depended on the total number points they earned by guessing doors with either green vs red arrows behind them. Children were told that green arrows were worth 10 pts and red arrows were only worth 5 pts and that the more points they received the better the box they could choose from. The experiment explained that the computer would ke ep track of the number of green and red arrows and their total number of points.

Much more complex than what you're insinuating

Are you implying the researchers didn't account for IQ, or are you just seeking a more positive-sounding restatement of the deviation from the norm?

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.

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).

anhedonia (an inability to feel pleasure) is one of the markers

I was hoping I wasn't the only one puzzled as to why "a reduced ability to experience joy is a key sign of clinical depression in young children" was newsworthy.

I hope the money invested in this research ends up enabling something that can help these poor kids. This is a real problem in our society.