Ruminative emotion regulation (ER) has been identified as a critical risk factor for early-onset depression. During adolescence and emerging adulthood, the neural emotion processing circuits undergo critical maturational changes. To understand the interplay between rumination and neural emotion processing in the context of early-onset depression, we conducted a longitudinal and preregistered neuroimaging study (https://osf.io/jmxyv).

We investigated 61 right-handed participants, 28 MDD patients and 33 healthy controls (55 female, M = 36.14 years, SD = 13.29) with fMRI at baseline and after two years. During both fMRI sessions, participants underwent an affective priming task that assessed emotion processing of subliminally presented sad compared to neutral facial expressions. A group × time ANCOVA with rumination as covariate was performed for the amygdala and lateral prefrontal cortices as region-of-interest. We also explored task-based functional connectivity between the lateral prefrontal cortices and amygdala employing a PPI-analysis.

We found main effects of ruminative ER on amygdala and vlPFC activity as well as an explorative groupxrumination interaction on amygdala-vlPFC-connectivity: Elevated amygdala and vlPFC-activity were associated with increased ruminative tendencies in both, patients with MDD and HC. However, rumination was associated with increased amygdala-vlPFC-connectivity in healthy participants, in contrast to decreased connectivity in patients with MDD.

Our longitudinal neuroimaging study revealed that increased emotional reactivity toward negative stimuli and increased effort to regulate this reactivity is associated with habitual rumination in young people with and without depression. Importantly, early-onset depression may lead to a dysfunction of this regulation effort, as indicated by the decreased functional connectivity in young patients with depression.

Program

Forum Biopsychology

227 New University Sanderring 2

18/06/25

16:00

18:00

Sessions

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