In contrast to women, who demonstrated a relatively consistent pattern of EEG asymmetry results as a function of current depression severity, men exhibited a weak relationship and also inconsistent patterns of findings across these three reference montages. For example, men with moderate depressive symptoms, but not those with high levels of depressive symptoms, displayed relatively less left frontal activity than men with low levels of depression for the Cz reference; conversely, linked mastoid results demonstrated that men with high levels of depression exhibited relatively greater left frontal brain activity at rest than men with low levels of depression. Results for the average reference were non-significant. The linked-mastoid findings are consistent with one study that directly compared gender differences using an average reference (Miller et al., 2002), yet inconsistent with another study that examined a male sample using a linked-ears reference (Jacobs & Snyder, 1996). Although the latter study found that men with relative left frontal EEG asymmetry displayed lower BDI scores, significant results were confined to only one site (whereas results for the present study extend across a wide region
