In addition to clinically depressed patients, a lack of affective modulation of startle response was also evident in individuals with nonclinical depressive symptoms. Mneimne and colleagues (2008) examined college students and found that, compared with students who reported no depressive symptoms, defined as scoring <11 on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996), those who reported nonclinical depressive symptoms exhibited undifferentiated startle responses to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral stimuli alike. Another study found that, relative to nondepressed college students, nonclinically depressed students showed reduced startle attenuation to pleasant stimuli but normal startle potentiation to unpleasant stimuli (Larson et al., 2007).
