Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 57, Issue 7, 1 April 2005, Pages 809-812
Biological Psychiatry

Brief reports
Activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in response to maternal criticism and praise in recovered depressed and healthy control participants

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.01.012Get rights and content

Background

High family levels of expressed emotion reliably predict relapse in patients with schizophrenia and mood disorders; however, the neural mechanisms linking expressed emotion and relapse are unexplored. Dysfunctional activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been implicated in the pathophysiology of depression. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess focal activation changes in DLPFC in response to a novel psychosocial challenge stimulus developed from the expressed emotion construct.

Methods

Healthy control subjects and fully remitted unipolar depressed participants completed blood oxygen level–dependent fMRI while they heard their own mothers making critical and praising comments about them.

Results

Relative to control subjects, participants with a history of depression failed to activate DLPFC when they heard critical remarks. There were no differences between the two groups in their DLPFC responses to maternal praise.

Conclusions

Even if fully well at the time of testing, participants with a known vulnerability to depression respond differently to the psychosocial challenge of being criticized. These findings might have implications for our understanding of vulnerability to depression and to depressive relapse.

Section snippets

Participants

Sixteen right-handed individuals (aged 20–30 years) were recruited into the study. Nine participants (five women, four men; aged 23.9 ± 2.6 years [mean ± SD]) were control subjects with no history of Axis I disorder based on a structured clinical interview (SCID; First et al 1997). In addition, seven participants (all women; aged 25.7 ± 2.3 years) who had a past history of one or more episodes of major depression diagnosed by an experienced clinical interviewer according to DSM-IV criteria (

Mood challenge: Behavioral effects

Participants were asked to report on their mood with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al 1988) at regular intervals during the experimental protocol. The PANAS contains 10 positive (e.g., interested, proud) and 10 negative (e.g., ashamed, irritable) mood descriptors. Each item is rated on a 1–5 scale (1 = very slightly or not at all; 5 = extremely). As expected, after hearing praise, there was a significant increase in subjects’ positive mood compared with baseline

Discussion

This preliminary study suggests that people with a known vulnerability to depression, even when they are not depressed, respond differently than control subjects when they are confronted with an affective challenge. After being criticized by their mothers, fully remitted depressed participants showed a greater increase in negative mood, along with a significant failure to activate DLPFC compared with healthy control subjects. No significant differences between the control subjects and the

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