Emotional Clarity as a Mechanism Linking Emotional Neglect and Depressive Symptoms during Early Adolescence.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jessar AJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5560615 | biostudies-other | 2017 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:Emotional neglect is associated with multiple negative outcomes, particularly increased risk for depression. Motivated by increasing evidence of reward-related ventral striatum (VS) dysfunction in depression, we investigated the role of developmental changes in VS activity on the emergence of depressive symptomatology as a function of emotional neglect.We examined relationships between longitudinal neuroimaging of reward-related VS activity, assessments of mood, and measures of emotional neglect in 106 participants first scanned between ages 11 to 15 and then 2 years later.We found that greater levels of emotional neglect were associated with blunted development of reward-related VS activity between the first and second assessments (as indexed by lower residualized change scores). Additionally, we found that decreases in this reward-related VS activity were related to greater depressive symptomatology and partially mediated the association between emotional neglect and subsequent depressive symptomatology.Our results provide an important demonstration that blunted development of reward-related VS activity as a function of emotional neglect predicts the emergence of depressive symptoms in adolescents. Further, our results are consistent with emerging evidence for the importance of reward-related VS dysfunction in the etiology and pathophysiology of depression. These results are a first step toward developing the ability to predict, prevent, and treat stress-related psychopathology through the targeting of specific neural phenotypes.
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Project description: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 non-clinical 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.
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Project description:ObjectivePrevious studies have reported that childhood maltreatment experiences could induce biological and psychological vulnerability in depressive disorders. However, it is still unclear that type-specific effects of childhood maltreatment on psychological resilience, depressive symptoms and interactions among childhood maltreatment experiences, resilience, and depressive symptoms.MethodsA total of 438 medical students were included in the study. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, the Conner-Davidson Resilience Scale, and the Beck Depression Inventory were used for measuring childhood maltreatment experiences, psychological resilience, and depressive symptoms, respectively. We investigated the effects of childhood maltreatment experiences on resilience and depressive symptoms using correlation analysis. In addition, we analyzed the mediating effect of resilience on the association between childhood maltreatment and symptoms of depression.ResultsAmong childhood maltreatment, emotional neglect was a significant predictor of the scores of low resilience and high depressive symptoms in both gender groups (all ps<0.05). Furthermore, resilience was found to be a mediator connecting emotional neglect experiences with depressive symptoms.ConclusionOur results suggest that emotional neglect has detrimental effects on mood and resilience, and clinicians need to focus on the recovery of resilience when they deal with depressive symptoms in victims of childhood maltreatment.
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Project description:Depression is associated with increased emotional response to stress. This is especially the case during the developmental period of adolescence. Cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation strategy that has been shown to reduce the impact of emotional response on psychopathology. However, less is known about whether cognitive reappraisal impacts the relationship between depressive symptoms and emotional responses, and whether its effects are specific to emotional reactivity or emotional recovery. The current study examined whether cognitive reappraisal moderated the relationship between depressive symptoms and trait or state measures of emotional reactivity and recovery. A community sample of 127 adolescents (M-age?=?15.28; 49% female, 47% Caucasian), at an age of risk for depression, completed self-report measures of trait emotional responding and depressive symptoms. In addition, they completed an in vivo social stress task and were assessed on state emotional reactivity and recovery from the stressor. Findings suggested that cognitive reappraisal was associated with an attenuated impact of depressive symptoms on trait and state emotional recovery. These results provide evidence that cognitive reappraisal may be an effective strategy for improving some aspects of emotional responding in relation to depressive symptoms among adolescents.
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Project description:Adolescence is often characterized by sleep disturbances that can affect the development of white matter tracts implicated in affective and cognitive regulation, including the cingulate portion of the cingulum bundle (CGC) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF). These effects may be exacerbated in adolescents exposed to early life adversity (ELA). We examined the longitudinal relations between sleep problems and CGC and UF microstructure during adolescence and their relation to depressive symptoms as a function of exposure to ELA. We assessed self-reported sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms and acquired diffusion-weighted MRI scans twice: in early adolescence (9-13 years) and four years later (13-17 years) (N = 72 complete cases). Independent of ELA, higher initial levels and increases in sleep problems were related to increases in depressive symptoms. Further, increases in right CGC fractional anisotropy (FA) mediated the association between sleep problems and depressive symptoms for youth who experienced lower, but not higher, levels of ELA. In youth with higher ELA, higher initial levels of and steeper decreases in sleep problems were associated with greater decreases in right UF FA, but were unrelated to depressive symptoms. Our findings highlight the importance of sleep quality in shaping fronto-cingulate-limbic tract development and depressive symptoms during adolescence.
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Project description:Low emotional clarity has been a target for psychological interventions due to its association with increased internalising symptoms. However, theory suggests that very high emotional clarity may also lead to increased symptoms, particularly in combination with high levels of neuroticism. As an initial empirical test of this hypothesis, the present study examined curvilinear associations of emotional clarity with internalising symptoms (i.e. dysphoria, social anxiety, panic, traumatic intrusions) and a moderating role of neuroticism/negative affect in the association across two student samples and two clinical samples (total N = 920). Evidence of curvilinear associations and moderation varied across samples, with some supporting evidence in three samples. Specifically, neuroticism/negative affect moderated the curvilinear association of emotional clarity with traumatic intrusions in Clinical Sample 2 as well as the linear association between emotional clarity and dysphoria in Student Sample 2 and Clinical Sample 1. Simple slope analyses indicated that high emotional clarity was not consistently associated with lower symptoms. Also, the hypothesised quadratic effects of emotional clarity were found in Student Sample 2 and Clinical Sample 1 for panic, and in Clinical Sample 1 for dysphoria. Implications and limitations of these findings for conceptualisations of emotional clarity and current treatments were discussed.
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Project description:Screen-based sedentary behaviors and emotional disorders are associated with one another in youth. Yet, the direction of the association is unclear, as is whether specific types of screen-based sedentary behaviors and emotional disorder symptoms are more closely linked. This study estimated the bi-directional associations between two types of screen-based sedentary behaviors and four types of self-reported emotional disorder symptoms, and tested whether physical activity buffered these associations in a Los Angeles high school student cohort (N = 2525, baseline Mage = 14.6 years). Participants completed baseline (9th Grade, 2013) and 12-month follow-up (10th grade, 2014) surveys reporting on: television viewing and computer/videogame use (≥4 h/day; yes/no), physical activity (≥60 min/day for ≥5 days/week), and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Panic Disorder (PD), and Social Phobia (SP) symptoms (meet/exceed [sub]clinical symptom threshold; yes/no). After adjusting for baseline screen-based sedentary behavior and covariates, students with (sub)clinical baseline MDD and GAD were at increased odds of high computer/videogame use one year later (OR = 1.36[95%CI, 1.07-1.73]; OR = 1.36[95%CI,1.09-1.71], respectively). Baseline SP was marginally related to increased computer/videogame use at follow-up (OR = 1.33[95%CI,1.04-1.69]). Greater baseline computer/videogame use was associated with increased odds of (sub)clinical GAD (OR = 1.54[95%CI,1.23-1.94]) and (sub)clinical SP (OR = 1.64[95%CI 1.27-2.12]) at follow-up; these associations were suppressed among baseline physically active students. Television viewing was unrelated to emotional disorder symptoms and PD was not associated with screen-based sedentary behaviors. Thus, only reciprocal associations between computer/videogame use, SP, and GAD during a one-year period of adolescence were observed. Interventions reducing computer/videogame use and increasing physical activity may improve adolescent emotional health.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Despite many attempts to understand the genetic architecture of depression, little progress has been made. The majority of these studies, however, have been carried out in adults and do not account for the potential influence of development. METHODS:The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a longitudinal pregnancy cohort which recruited participants between April 1991 and December 1992. Analyses were replicated in two independent European cohorts. Genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) software was used to investigate SNP-heritability (h2SNP) of depression across adolescence, the role of puberty was investigated by stratifying these estimates according to pubertal onset. Genome-wide association studies were performed to identify genetic variants associated with depression at different stages of development. RESULTS:Heritability was estimated between the ages of 11 and 18 with sample sizes ranging from 3289 to 5480. Heritability was low with an apparent peak was found at age 13 (h2 = 0.17, p = 0.006). Confidence intervals around these estimates suggest an upper-bound to h2SNP of around 30%. A variant located on chromosome 7 was found to be associated with depressive symptoms at age 13 in ALSPAC (rs138191010: ? = 0.142, p = 2.51 × 10-8), although this was not replicated. CONCLUSIONS:Although power is a potential limitation, the observed patterns provide interesting hypotheses surrounding the heritability of depression at different developmental stages. We found substantially lower estimates for depressive symptoms at age 11 (0.07) compared to those previously estimated in adults (0.21). We also found a peak in heritability at age 13. These findings suggest environmental factors are likely to be more important in the aetiology of depressive symptoms in early adolescence than in adulthood.
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Project description:Body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms are commonly experienced during adolescence and increase the risk of adverse health outcomes, especially eating disorders. However, the dominant temporal associations between these two experiences (i.e., whether one is a risk factor for the other or the two are mutually reinforcing) has yet to be fully explored. We examined the associations between body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms assessed at baseline and 5- and 10-year follow-up in younger (M age = 12.9 years at baseline, 56% female, n = 577) and older (M age = 15.9 years at baseline, 57% female, n = 1,325) adolescent cohorts assessed as part of Project Eating Among Teens and Young Adults. Associations between body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms were examined using cross-lagged models. For females, the dominant directionality was for body dissatisfaction predicting later depressive symptoms. For males, the picture was more complex, with developmentally sensitive associations in which depressive symptoms predicted later body dissatisfaction in early adolescence and early adulthood, but the reverse association was dominant during middle adolescence. These findings suggest that interventions should be tailored to dynamic risk profiles that shift over adolescence and early adulthood, and that targeting body dissatisfaction at key periods during development may have downstream impacts on depressive symptoms.
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Project description:Background: Experiences of early life maltreatment (ELM) are alarmingly common and represent a risk factor for the development of psychopathology, particularly depression. Research has focused on alterations in autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning as a mediator of negative mental health outcomes associated with ELM. Early alterations in autonomic vagal activity (vmHRV) may moderate the relationship between ELM and depression, particularly when considering forms of emotional maltreatment. Recent evidence suggests that the relationships of both ELM and vmHRV with depression may be non-linear, particularly considering females.Objective: Building on and extending theoretical considerations and previous work, the present work aims to further the current understanding of the complex relationships between ELM exposure, vmHRV, and depression.Methods: This study uses an adaptive modelling approach, combining exploratory network-based analyses with linear and quadratic moderation analyses, drawing on a large sample of males and females across adolescence (total N = 213; outpatient at-risk sample and healthy controls) and adulthood (total N = 85; community-based convenience sample).Results: Exploratory network-based analyses reveal that exposure to emotional abuse is particularly central within a network of ELM subtypes, depressive symptoms, and concurrent vmHRV in both adolescents and adults. In adults, emotional neglect shows strong associations with both emotional abuse and vmHRV and is highly central as a network node, which is not observed in adolescents. Moderator analyses reveal significant interactions between emotional maltreatment and vmHRV predicting depressive symptoms in adult females. Significant quadratic relationships of emotional maltreatment and vmHRV with depression are observed in both adolescent and adult females.Conclusions: The present findings contribute to the understanding of the psychological and physiological mechanisms by which ELM acts as a risk factor for the development of depression. Ultimately, this will contribute to the development of targeted and effective intervention strategies to mitigate the detrimental effects of early adversity.
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