According to a new study published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the University of Souther California have discovered how mood can be decoded from neural signals in a person's brain.  This is a key step towards creating new treatments, including brain stimulation, for depression and other disorders, especially for patients who do not respond to current treatments.

The group of researchers recruited seven volunteers whose brain signals were analyzed as they answered 24 questions.  In each of the questions, the patient was asked to "rate how you feel" by tapping one of seven buttons, rating between "depressed" and "happy".

Using this methodology, the researchers were able to uncover the brain patterns that matched self-reported moods, which could then be used to build an automated decoder for determining mood variations.

The new decoding technology, researcher Maryam Shanechi explained, could also be extended to develop closed-loop systems for other neuropsychiatric conditions such as chronic pain, addiction, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and whose behavioral assessment is difficult and thus not frequently available.