Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Transl Psychiatry. 2022 May 10;12(1):195. doi: 10.1038/s41398-022-01955-5.
Adolescence represents a critical developmental period where the prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) increases. Aberrant emotion processing is a core feature of adolescent MDD that has been associated with functional alterations within the prefrontal-amygdala circuitry. In this study, we tested cognitive and neural mechanisms of emotional face processing in adolescents with MDD utilizing a combination of computational modeling and neuroimaging. Thirty adolescents with MDD (age: M = 16.1 SD = 1.4, 20 females) and 33 healthy controls (age: M = 16.2 SD = 1.9, 20 females) performed a dynamic face- and shape-matching task. A linear ballistic accumulator model was fit to the behavioral data to study differences in evidence accumulation. We used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to study effective connectivity in the prefrontal-amygdala network to reveal the neural underpinnings of cognitive impairments while performing the task. Face processing efficiency was reduced in the MDD group and most pronounced for ambiguous faces with neutral emotional expressions. Critically, this reduction was related to increased deactivation of the subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC). Connectivity analysis showed that MDD exhibited altered functional coupling in a distributed network spanning the fusiform face area-lateral prefrontal cortex-sgACC and the sgACC-amygdala pathway. Our results suggest that MDD is related to impairments of processing nuanced facial expressions. Distributed dysfunctional coupling in the face processing network might result in inefficient evidence sampling and inappropriate emotional responses contributing to depressive symptomatology. Our study provides novel insights in the characterization of brain function in adolescents with MDD that strongly emphasize the critical role of aberrant prefrontal-amygdala interactions during emotional face processing.
青春期是一个关键的发育阶段，重度抑郁症（MDD）的患病率在此期间增加。情绪处理异常是青少年 MDD 的一个核心特征，与前额叶-杏仁核回路的功能改变有关。在这项研究中，我们利用计算建模和神经影像学相结合的方法，测试了 MDD 青少年的情绪面孔处理的认知和神经机制。30 名 MDD 青少年（年龄：M=16.1，SD=1.4，20 名女性）和 33 名健康对照组（年龄：M=16.2，SD=1.9，20 名女性）完成了一个动态面孔和形状匹配任务。我们对行为数据进行了线性弹道累积器模型拟合，以研究证据积累的差异。我们使用动态因果建模（DCM）研究前额叶-杏仁核网络中的有效连接，以揭示执行任务时认知障碍的神经基础。MDD 组的面孔处理效率降低，对于具有中性情绪表达的模糊面孔最为明显。重要的是，这种降低与 sgACC 的去激活增加有关。连接分析表明，MDD 在跨越梭状回面孔区-外侧前额叶皮层-sgACC 和 sgACC-杏仁核通路的分布式网络中表现出功能连接的改变。我们的研究结果表明，MDD 与处理细微面部表情的能力受损有关。面孔处理网络中分布式功能连接的紊乱可能导致证据取样效率低下和情绪反应不当，从而导致抑郁症状。我们的研究为 MDD 青少年的大脑功能特征提供了新的见解，强调了情绪面孔处理过程中异常的前额叶-杏仁核相互作用的关键作用。
