For decades, the frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) – a disproportion in EEG alpha oscillations power between right and left frontal channels – has been one of the most popular measures of depressive disorders (DD) in electrophysiology studies. Patients with DD often manifest a left-sided FAA: relatively higher alpha power in the left versus right frontal lobe. Recently, however, multiple studies failed to confirm this effect, questioning its reproducibility. Our purpose is to thoroughly test the validity of FAA in depression by conducting a multiverse analysis – running many related analyses and testing the sensitivity of the effect to changes in the analytical approach – on data from five independent studies. Only 13 of the 270 analyses revealed significant results. We conclude the paper by discussing theoretical assumptions underlying the FAA and suggest a list of guidelines for improving and expanding the EEG data analysis in future FAA studies.

The dataset contains EEG resting data from three independent studies on depressive disorders. All EEG files are in eeglab format (so there are actually two files for each recording: `.set` and `.fdt`). Each file has been resampled, 1 Hz high pass filtered and cleaned with ICA (components related to blinks, eye movements, cardiac or muscle activity were removed).

The repository contains three out of five datasets that were used in the study. The other two datasets are already publicly available (see more information in the paper).
For more usage information see the readme.txt.