Evaluative and Habitual Behavior in Depression

The problem of how we evaluate our experiences as they are happening is attracting renewed interest in the neurosciences. However, how we subjectively generate and experience these evaluations (often automatically) has been largely neglected. We examine how the pre-reflective evaluation of experience as it is happening is biased in depression and how it may be important for understanding the pathophysiology and implicated neural circuitry of depression. We begin by reviewing the neuroscience of evaluation of depression and then describe how the phenomenology amplifies this approach by applying this to case analyses of depression. We conclude that a profound understanding of automatic evaluation is important for understanding depression. It furthermore offers ways of thinking about the neural circuitry of depression. A fine-grained phenomenology of automatic evaluation provides a novel approach to examine the neuroscience of bias and evaluation in depression.