NORMENT, Division of Mental Health and Addiction, Oslo University Hospital & Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
PROMENTA Research Center, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Transl Psychiatry. 2024 Aug 2;14(1):317. doi: 10.1038/s41398-024-03036-1.
Several mental disorders emerge during childhood or adolescence and are often characterized by socioemotional difficulties, including alterations in emotion perception. Emotional facial expressions are processed in discrete functional brain modules whose connectivity patterns encode emotion categories, but the involvement of these neural circuits in psychopathology in youth is poorly understood. This study examined the associations between activation and functional connectivity patterns in emotion circuits and psychopathology during development. We used task-based fMRI data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC, N = 1221, 8-23 years) and conducted generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) analyses. Measures of psychopathology were derived from an independent component analysis of questionnaire data. The results showed positive associations between identifying fearful, sad, and angry faces and depressive symptoms, and a negative relationship between sadness recognition and positive psychosis symptoms. We found a positive main effect of depressive symptoms on BOLD activation in regions overlapping with the default mode network, while individuals reporting higher levels of norm-violating behavior exhibited emotion-specific lower functional connectivity within regions of the salience network and between modules that overlapped with the salience and default mode network. Our findings illustrate the relevance of functional connectivity patterns underlying emotion processing for behavioral problems in children and adolescents.
几种精神障碍在儿童或青少年时期出现，通常以社会情感困难为特征，包括情绪感知的改变。情绪面部表情在离散的功能大脑模块中进行处理，其连接模式编码情绪类别，但这些神经回路在青年精神病理学中的参与程度尚不清楚。本研究探讨了情绪回路的激活和功能连接模式与发展过程中的精神病理学之间的关联。我们使用费城神经发育队列（PNC，N=1221，8-23 岁）的基于任务的 fMRI 数据，并进行了广义心理生理交互（gPPI）分析。精神病理学的衡量标准来自问卷数据的独立成分分析。结果表明，识别恐惧、悲伤和愤怒面孔与抑郁症状呈正相关，而悲伤识别与阳性精神病症状呈负相关。我们发现抑郁症状对默认模式网络重叠区域的 BOLD 激活有正的主要影响，而报告更高水平的违反规范行为的个体在突显网络内的区域和与突显和默认模式网络重叠的模块之间表现出情绪特异性的较低功能连接。我们的研究结果表明，情绪处理的功能连接模式与儿童和青少年的行为问题密切相关。
