Autonomic complexity dynamically indexes affect regulation in everyday life.

Abstract

Affect regulation often is disrupted in depression. Understanding biomarkers of affect regulation in ecologically valid contexts is critical for identifying moments when interventions can be delivered to improve regulation and may have utility for identifying which individuals are vulnerable to psychopathology. Autonomic complexity, which includes linear and nonlinear indices of heart rate variability, has been proposed as a novel marker of neurovisceral integration. However, it is not clear how autonomic complexity tracks with regulation in everyday life, and whether low complexity serves as a marker of related psychopathology. To measure regulation phenotypes with diminished influence of current symptoms, 37 young adults with remitted major depressive disorder (rMDD) and 28 healthy comparisons (HCs) completed ambulatory assessments of autonomic complexity and affect regulation across one week in everyday life. Multilevel models indicated that in HCs, but not rMDD, autonomic complexity fluctuated in response to regulation cues, increasing in response to reappraisal and distraction and decreasing in response to negative affect. Higher complexity across the week predicted greater everyday regulation success, whereas greater variability of complexity predicted lower (and less variable) negative affect, rumination, and mind-wandering. Results suggest that ambulatory assessment of autonomic complexity can passively index dynamic aspects of real-world affect and regulation, and that dynamic physiological reactivity to regulation is restricted in rMDD. These results demonstrate how intensive sampling of dynamic, nonlinear regulatory processes can advance our understanding of potential mechanisms underlying psychopathology. Such measurements might inform how to test interventions to enhance neurovisceral complexity and affect regulation success in real time.

The mind wanders to dark places: Mind-wandering catalyzes rumination in the context of negative affect and impulsivity.

“…The analyses reported in this article involved a secondary analysis of existing data rather than new data collection. The data were originally collected to study neural and ambulatory markers of emotion regulation, which has led to several preliminary articles (Stange et al, 2023; Xu et al, 2024). We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study.…”

Studying fine-grained elements of psychopathology to advance mental health science.

“…Several respondents also noted a critical need to integrate various frameworks for psychopathology such as HiTOP and RDoC to ensure there were no redundancies between them (e.g., Michelini et al, 2021) and to allow for rigorous measurement and testing of constructs advanced by each system. Similarly, the importance of integrating the multimethod approaches to the measurement between frameworks was clear, although the small intercorrelations among various measurement modalities pose a challenge here—for example, self-report symptoms correlated more highly with other self-report symptoms than they do electroencephalogram (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or genetics, and vice versa (see Stange et al, 2023, and Pasion et al, 2023, for examples of such studies). The commentary by Joyner and Perkins (2023) discusses this topic in greater detail as well.…”

To fully leverage fine-grained clinical phenomena, we have to think beyond DSM-based concepts and the presumption of diagnostic kinds.

“…Certainly, as noted, there is great potential for more nuanced and specific structural models, as well as the identification of symptoms (or even syndromes) that may cut across DSM disorders, or else are poorly represented by them, as noted by Karlovich et al (2023). Fine-grained data also stand to improve dynamic computational models that endeavor to be more closely connected to sophisticated theory and to psychopathology as individuals experience it (Stange et al, 2023; Olthof et al, 2023), thereby facilitating clinical translation.…”

“…Misspecification of boundaries produces misleading results regarding the importance of symptoms in relation to each other (Neal & Neal, 2023; Neal et al, 2022). In addition, framing questions in terms of processes or mechanisms within a given disorder (e.g., major depression) implies that the phenomena being studied are specific to a particular disorder—an assumption that may well be unwarranted (see Stange et al, 2023). This practice can also obscure individual differences in dynamic, within-person processes, which may have little or nothing to do with diagnostic group status (Kullar et al, 2023).…”

“…This section is a remarkable effort led by three researchers who approach psychopathology in different, but complementary ways. Fittingly, the articles comprising this section provide distinct perspectives on the target topic, including genetics (Waldman & Poore, 2023), neuroanatomy (Rowe et al, 2023), psychophysiology (Pasion et al, 2023; Stange et al, 2023), epidemiology (Karlovich et al, 2023), and intervention (Olthof et al, 2023). I carry this stance of pluralistic collegiality into my commentary as well.…”