Relationships between depressive symptoms and brain responses during emotional movie viewing emerge in adolescence

Abstract

Affective disorders such as major depression are common but serious illnesses characterized by altered processing of emotional information. Although the frequency and severity of depressive symptoms increase dramatically over the course of childhood and adolescence, much of our understanding of their neurobiological bases comes from work characterizing adults' responses to static emotional information. As a consequence, relationships between depressive brain phenotypes and naturalistic emotional processing, as well as the manner in which these associations emerge over the lifespan, remain poorly understood. Here, we apply static and dynamic inter-subject correlation analyses to examine how brain function is associated with clinical and nonclinical depressive symptom severity in 112 children and adolescents (7-21 years old) who viewed an emotionally evocative clip from the film Despicable Me during functional MRI. Our results reveal that adolescents with greater depressive symptom severity exhibit atypical fMRI responses during movie viewing, and that this effect is stronger during less emotional moments of the movie. Furthermore, adolescents with more similar item-level depressive symptom profiles showed more similar brain responses during movie viewing. In contrast, children's depressive symptom severity and profiles were unrelated to their brain response typicality or similarity. Together, these results indicate a developmental change in the relationships between brain function and depressive symptoms from childhood through adolescence. Our findings suggest that depressive symptoms may shape how the brain responds to complex emotional information in a dynamic manner sensitive to both developmental stage and affective context.

High performers demonstrate greater neural synchrony than low performers across behavioral domains

“…Additionally, inclusion of a sample of children and adolescents specifically allows us to test if brain-behavior relationships look significantly different in development than they do in adulthood. Recent work found that a relationship between depression symptoms and intersubject correlation during movie watching emerges in adolescence, suggesting that brain-behavior relationships may vary as a function of age (Gruskin et al, 2020). Ultimately, across both the developmental and young adult sample, we find significant evidence for the AnnaK model.…”

Facilitating the Need for Self-Esteem to Approach the Adolescents’ Chemistry Learning Style

“…Adolescence development tasks embody personal independence and a philosophy of life which are confronted with learning to achieve new forms of intimate relationships, preparing for an occupation, achieving emotional independence of parents, and developing a mature set of values and ethical principals (Ekerdt, 2002;Gruskin, Rosenberg, & Holmes, 2019). Therefore, adolescence can be defined as a period of experiment and exploration of various identities and attitudes which rapid change and is centered on adolescent's relationship to authority (Lawrence, 2006;Maes et.al., 2019).…”