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Age and gender modulate the neural circuitry supporting facial emotion processing in adults with major depressive disorder.

ABSTRACT: Emotion processing, supported by frontolimbic circuitry known to be sensitive to the effects of aging, is a relatively understudied cognitive-emotional domain in geriatric depression. Some evidence suggests that the neurophysiological disruption observed in emotion processing among adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) may be modulated by both gender and age. Therefore, the present study investigated the effects of gender and age on the neural circuitry supporting emotion processing in MDD.Cross-sectional comparison of fMRI signal during performance of an emotion processing task.Outpatient university setting.One hundred adults recruited by MDD status, gender, and age.Participants underwent fMRI while completing the Facial Emotion Perception Test. They viewed photographs of faces and categorized the emotion perceived. Contrast for fMRI was of face perception minus animal identification blocks.Effects of depression were observed in precuneus and effects of age in a number of frontolimbic regions. Three-way interactions were present between MDD status, gender, and age in regions pertinent to emotion processing, including frontal, limbic, and basal ganglia. Young women with MDD and older men with MDD exhibited hyperactivation in these regions compared with their respective same-gender healthy comparison (HC) counterparts. In contrast, older women and younger men with MDD exhibited hypoactivation compared to their respective same-gender HC counterparts.This the first study to report gender- and age-specific differences in emotion processing circuitry in MDD. Gender-differential mechanisms may underlie cognitive-emotional disruption in older adults with MDD. The present findings have implications for improved probes into the heterogeneity of the MDD syndrome.

SUBMITTER: Briceno EM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4241383 | biostudies-other | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Age and gender modulate the neural circuitry supporting facial emotion processing in adults with major depressive disorder.

Briceño Emily M EM Rapport Lisa J LJ Kassel Michelle T MT Bieliauskas Linas A LA Zubieta Jon-Kar JK Weisenbach Sara L SL Langenecker Scott A SA

The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry 20140523 3

<h4>Objectives</h4>Emotion processing, supported by frontolimbic circuitry known to be sensitive to the effects of aging, is a relatively understudied cognitive-emotional domain in geriatric depression. Some evidence suggests that the neurophysiological disruption observed in emotion processing among adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) may be modulated by both gender and age. Therefore, the present study investigated the effects of gender and age on the neural circuitry supporting emotio ...[more]

PMID: 25085721

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Project description:BackgroundSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) are highly comorbid and share impairments in self-referential and social processing. Many naturalistic judgements activate these processes concurrently, which can be referred to as "self-other referential processing". We sought to examine its neural correlates in young people with SAD and MDD using a novel experimental task.MethodsFifty six young people aged 16 to 25 with diagnoses of SAD and/or MDD (15 with SAD [M = 20.3 years, 60% female], 17 with MDD [M = 19.8 years, 53% female], 24 with comorbid SAD and MDD [M = 19.8 years, 67% female]) and 76 age and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs; M = 20.7 years, 66% female) completed a novel self-other referential processing fMRI task that involved rating how much one related to emotional faces in active conditions and judging how far apart each person's eyes were in control conditions.ResultsParticipants with SAD had more and those with MDD had less activity in social cognitive areas than HCs when processing social information across all conditions and emotion types. Participants with comorbid SAD-MDD exhibited a distinct pattern of neural activity to patients with single diagnoses. Across the whole sample, the activation of reward system areas (the medial orbitofrontal cortex and caudate) in response to increasing relatedness correlated positively with a dimensional measure of social anxiety.ConclusionsYoung people with SAD, MDD and comorbid SAD-MDD showed deficits in social processing, but they were not specifically related to self-other referential processing. Dimensional social anxiety symptoms were correlated with reward system activation, suggesting that such symptoms are associated with an overestimation of the hedonic value of social stimuli. These novel findings have implications for our understanding of the neural correlates of SAD and MDD, suggesting that alterations in social processing and reward functioning underlie the impairments in self and social processing that characterize both disorders.

Dataset Information

Age and gender modulate the neural circuitry supporting facial emotion processing in adults with major depressive disorder.

Publications

Age and gender modulate the neural circuitry supporting facial emotion processing in adults with major depressive disorder.

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