2 results
Childhood stress, grown-up brain networks: corticolimbic correlates of threat-related early life stress and adult stress response
- R. H. Kaiser, R. Clegg, F. Goer, P. Pechtel, M. Beltzer, G. Vitaliano, D. P. Olson, M. H. Teicher, D. A. Pizzagalli
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- Journal:
- Psychological Medicine / Volume 48 / Issue 7 / May 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 September 2017, pp. 1157-1166
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- Article
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Background
Exposure to threat-related early life stress (ELS) has been related to vulnerability for stress-related disorders in adulthood, putatively via disrupted corticolimbic circuits involved in stress response and regulation. However, previous research on ELS has not examined both the intrinsic strength and flexibility of corticolimbic circuits, which may be particularly important for adaptive stress responding, or associations between these dimensions of corticolimbic dysfunction and acute stress response in adulthood.
MethodsSeventy unmedicated women varying in history of threat-related ELS completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan to evaluate voxelwise static (overall) and dynamic (variability over a series of sliding windows) resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) of bilateral amygdala. In a separate session and subset of participants (n = 42), measures of salivary cortisol and affect were collected during a social-evaluative stress challenge.
ResultsHigher severity of threat-related ELS was related to more strongly negative static RSFC between amygdala and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and elevated dynamic RSFC between amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). Static amygdala-DLPFC antagonism mediated the relationship between higher severity of threat-related ELS and blunted cortisol response to stress, but increased dynamic amygdala-rACC connectivity weakened this mediated effect and was related to more positive post-stress mood.
ConclusionsThreat-related ELS was associated with RSFC within lateral corticolimbic circuits, which in turn was related to blunted physiological response to acute stress. Notably, increased flexibility between the amygdala and rACC compensated for this static disruption, suggesting that more dynamic medial corticolimbic circuits might be key to restoring healthy stress response.
A computational analysis of flanker interference in depression
- D. G. Dillon, T. Wiecki, P. Pechtel, C. Webb, F. Goer, L. Murray, M. Trivedi, M. Fava, P. J. McGrath, M. Weissman, R. Parsey, B. Kurian, P. Adams, T. Carmody, S. Weyandt, K. Shores-Wilson, M. Toups, M. McInnis, M. A. Oquendo, C. Cusin, P. Deldin, G. Bruder, D. A. Pizzagalli
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- Journal:
- Psychological Medicine / Volume 45 / Issue 11 / August 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 March 2015, pp. 2333-2344
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Background
Depression is characterized by poor executive function, but – counterintuitively – in some studies, it has been associated with highly accurate performance on certain cognitively demanding tasks. The psychological mechanisms responsible for this paradoxical finding are unclear. To address this issue, we applied a drift diffusion model (DDM) to flanker task data from depressed and healthy adults participating in the multi-site Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response for Clinical Care for Depression (EMBARC) study.
MethodOne hundred unmedicated, depressed adults and 40 healthy controls completed a flanker task. We investigated the effect of flanker interference on accuracy and response time, and used the DDM to examine group differences in three cognitive processes: prepotent response bias (tendency to respond to the distracting flankers), response inhibition (necessary to resist prepotency), and executive control (required for execution of correct response on incongruent trials).
ResultsConsistent with prior reports, depressed participants responded more slowly and accurately than controls on incongruent trials. The DDM indicated that although executive control was sluggish in depressed participants, this was more than offset by decreased prepotent response bias. Among the depressed participants, anhedonia was negatively correlated with a parameter indexing the speed of executive control (r = −0.28, p = 0.007).
ConclusionsExecutive control was delayed in depression but this was counterbalanced by reduced prepotent response bias, demonstrating how participants with executive function deficits can nevertheless perform accurately in a cognitive control task. Drawing on data from neural network simulations, we speculate that these results may reflect tonically reduced striatal dopamine in depression.