Dataset for "Relationship between change in social evaluation learning and mood in early antidepressant treatment: A prospective cohort study in primary care"

This study aimed to examine the association between change in social evaluation learning and mood over the first eight weeks of antidepressant treatment. Participants were primary care patients receiving antidepressant treatment under the care of their GP. Participants completed data collection at five timepoints; baseline (prior to starting antidepressants or within the first two weeks of treatment), two week, six week, eight week and six-month follow-up. At each testing session participants completed self-report measures of depression (BDI-II, PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), and a computerised task measuring learning of social evaluations about the self, a friend and a stranger.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic participants also completed three other cognitive tasks (associative learning, word categorisation and recall, and a facial emotion recognition task). To reduce fatigue effects associated with remote testing we removed these tasks from March 2020. Due to only a small number of participants completing these measures we have not analysed this data and have therefore not reported results in the associated paper. However, we have made the data open access to allow for exploratory research in preparation for potential future studies. Full details of these tasks are available in supplementary materials in the manuscript reporting our main findings.