People can not feel the depression instead of feeling happy or unhappy, they just could not sustain that feeling. People troubled by depression actually positive emotions rather than negative emotions, so that the healing needs to be stimulated positive emotions. These studies argue that the previous assumption, which states that depressed people's brains can not respond to feeling happy and positive.

"This shows that to deal with depressed people have given positive feedback is continuous and continuously so that he can maintain that feeling in his brain," said Richard Davidson of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as reported by HealthDay, Tuesday (22/12/2009).

Eva E Redei, professor of psychiatry at the Feinberg School of Medicine Nothwern University, Chicago previously mentioned experts agree that a person suffering from anhedonia, - one of the components of depression, namely the inability to feel pleasure -, will experience a decline in the ability to feel positive emotions . But the results of this study indicate different things, that depressed people can feel positive emotions, but fail to defend it.

A total of 27 adult depression and 19 non-depressed adults (controls) are shown a picture of a mother who was hugging her baby to find out how long a person to maintain the positive emotions generated from the image. Participants were then asked to hold the feeling of love from the picture for 45 minutes as he scanned his brain using fMRI.

As a result, non-depressed participants who can do that and showed increased activity in the brain nucleus accumben, which is part of responding to something positive.

But the depressed participants can not do that, increased brain activity occurs only at the beginning of it, but could not survive until the end of the allotted time. "The depression is actually a problem with positive emotions, rather than negative emotions. This study could be a reference to the treatment of depression by making drugs more focused on maintaining positive emotions rather than eliminate negative emotions," said Redei.