Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA.
Neuroimage. 2020 Aug 1;216:116217. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116217. Epub 2019 Oct 16.
Affective disorders such as major depression are common but serious illnesses characterized by altered processing of emotional information. Although the frequency and severity of depressive symptoms increase dramatically over the course of childhood and adolescence, much of our understanding of their neurobiological bases comes from work characterizing adults' responses to static emotional information. As a consequence, relationships between depressive brain phenotypes and naturalistic emotional processing, as well as the manner in which these associations emerge over the lifespan, remain poorly understood. Here, we apply static and dynamic inter-subject correlation analyses to examine how brain function is associated with clinical and non-clinical depressive symptom severity in 112 children and adolescents (7-21 years old) who viewed an emotionally evocative clip from the film Despicable Me during functional MRI. Our results reveal that adolescents with greater depressive symptom severity exhibit atypical fMRI responses during movie viewing, and that this effect is stronger during less emotional moments of the movie. Furthermore, adolescents with more similar item-level depressive symptom profiles showed more similar brain responses during movie viewing. In contrast, children's depressive symptom severity and profiles were unrelated to their brain response typicality or similarity. Together, these results indicate a developmental change in the relationships between brain function and depressive symptoms from childhood through adolescence. Our findings suggest that depressive symptoms may shape how the brain responds to complex emotional information in a dynamic manner sensitive to both developmental stage and affective context.
情感障碍，如重度抑郁症，是常见但严重的疾病，其特征是情绪信息处理的改变。尽管在儿童和青少年时期，抑郁症状的频率和严重程度显著增加，但我们对其神经生物学基础的了解很大程度上来自于对成年人对静态情绪信息反应的研究。因此，抑郁脑表型与自然情绪处理之间的关系，以及这些关联在整个生命周期中出现的方式，仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们应用静态和动态的受试者间相关分析来研究大脑功能与 112 名儿童和青少年（7-21 岁）的临床和非临床抑郁症状严重程度之间的关系，这些儿童和青少年在功能磁共振成像期间观看了电影《卑鄙的我》中一段情感唤起的片段。我们的结果表明，抑郁症状严重程度较高的青少年在观看电影时表现出异常的 fMRI 反应，而且这种效应在电影中不那么情绪化的时刻更强。此外，具有更相似项目水平抑郁症状特征的青少年在观看电影时表现出更相似的大脑反应。相比之下，儿童的抑郁症状严重程度和特征与他们的大脑反应典型性或相似性无关。总之，这些结果表明，从儿童期到青少年期，大脑功能与抑郁症状之间的关系发生了发展变化。我们的发现表明，抑郁症状可能以一种对发展阶段和情感背景都敏感的动态方式塑造大脑对复杂情绪信息的反应方式。
