Associations between childhood maltreatment and emotion processing biases in major depression: results from a dot-probe task

AbstractBackgroundChildren with a history of maltreatment suffer from altered emotion processing but the neural basis of this phenomenon is unknown. This pioneering functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the effects of severe childhood maltreatment on emotion processing while controlling for psychiatric conditions, medication and substance abuse.MethodTwenty medication-naive, substance abuse-free adolescents with a history of childhood abuse, 20 psychiatric control adolescents matched on psychiatric diagnoses but with no maltreatment and 27 healthy controls underwent a fMRI emotion discrimination task comprising fearful, angry, sad happy and neutral dynamic facial expressions.ResultsMaltreated participants responded faster to fearful expressions and demonstrated hyper-activation compared to healthy controls of classical fear-processing regions of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex, which survived at a more lenient threshold relative to psychiatric controls. Functional connectivity analysis, furthermore, demonstrated reduced connectivity between left vmPFC and insula for fear in maltreated participants compared to both healthy and psychiatric controls.ConclusionsThe findings show that people who have experienced childhood maltreatment have enhanced fear perception, both at the behavioural and neurofunctional levels, associated with enhanced fear-related ventromedial fronto-cingulate activation and altered functional connectivity with associated limbic regions. Furthermore, the connectivity adaptations were specific to the maltreatment rather than to the developing psychiatric conditions, whilst the functional changes were only evident at trend level when compared to psychiatric controls, suggesting a continuum. The neurofunctional hypersensitivity of fear-processing networks may be due to childhood over-exposure to fear in people who have been abused.

Download Full-text

Dot Probe Task

PsycTESTS Dataset ◽

10.1037/t19213-000 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Thomas L. Webb ◽

Margarita S. P. Ononaiye ◽

Paschal Sheeran ◽

John G. Reidy ◽

Anastasia Lavda

Keyword(s):

Dot Probe ◽

Probe Task

Download Full-text

Neurocircuitries of Emotion Processing Affected in Major Depressive Disorder

Cognitive Dimensions of Major Depressive Disorder ◽

10.1093/med/9780198810940.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 101-114

Author(s):

Anjali Sankar ◽

Cynthia H.Y. Fu

Keyword(s):

Major Depression ◽

Predictive Accuracy ◽

Emotion Processing ◽

Affective State ◽

Brain Regions ◽

First Episode ◽

Neuroimaging Data ◽

Multivariate Pattern ◽

Future Work ◽

Hallmark Feature

Impairments in processing emotions are a hallmark feature of depression. Advances in neuroimaging techniques have rapidly improved our understanding of the pathophysiology underlying major depression. In this chapter, we provide an overview of influential neural models of emotion perception and regulation and discuss the neurocircuitries of emotion processing that are affected. Major depression is characterized by impairments in widespread brain regions that are evident in the first episode. Models have sought to distinguish the neural circuitry associated with recognition of the emotion, integration of somatic responses, and monitoring of the affective state. In particular, there has been a preponderance of research on the neurocircuitries affected during processing of mood-congruent negative emotional stimuli in depression. While neuroimaging correlates have been investigated and models proposed, these findings have had limited clinical applicability to date. Novel methods such as multivariate pattern recognition applied to neuroimaging data might enable identification of reliable, valid, and robust biomarkers with high predictive accuracy that can be applied to an individual. Last, we discuss avenues for extension and future work.

Download Full-text