In a brain impact study of the neural circuits that control emotions in people with depression, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that people with depression react significantly differently than healthy people when dealing with negative situations. ”It’s normal for people to experience negative emotions in a given situation,” said study leader John Stone. “And the problem for people with depression is not that they have a negative reaction in a negative situation, but that they can’t get out of it; they seem to have deficits in their ability to regulate their emotions and recover from negative emotional experiences to their usual state.” The study was published in the latest Journal of Neuroscience. The emotional centers themselves respond dramatically differently in healthy and depressed people To assess the role of emotion regulation during depression, psychologists and psychiatrists designed a series of pictures, such as car accident scenes and dangerous animals, to elicit strong negative emotional responses, and then tested the brain responses of healthy or depressed people. Participants were asked to reduce their emotional responses to these negative pictures through subjective awareness, such as imagining a positive ending or envisioning that the picture scenes were not real but artificially created. “We asked them to reconstruct what they saw,” rather than distracting them or distracting them with irrelevant things, Johnstone said. “We hope to enhance or reduce their emotional impact by reinterpreting the emotional content of the stimuli through the intervention of cognitive areas of the brain.” As expected, both healthy and depressed people can serve to modulate the brain’s emotional centers by increasing activity in the cognitive cortex region of the prefrontal page of the brain. But there were dramatic differences in the responses of their mood centers themselves, including the amygdala, deep in the brain. In healthy individuals without depression, the high intensity of regulatory activity and the low intensity of activity in the emotional centers has the effect of suppressing the emotional response by subjective effort. In depressed individuals, on the other hand, activity in the regulatory areas is strong despite the simultaneous activity in the amygdala and other emotional centers remains strong. Essential emotional neural circuits are functionally deficient in depressed patients The study concluded that healthy people can effectively regulate their negative emotions through their own subjective efforts, but in depressed patients these essential emotional neural circuits are functionally deficient, and the more the patient tries, the more prominent this deficit appears. “The more healthy people use their cognitive abilities to regulate, the more pronounced the effect in terms of reducing central mood activity.” Johnstone explained. “Whereas in depressed people it’s the opposite – the more they try, the stronger the activity in the central amygdala of the mood center is in turn.” Although the exact mechanism is not yet known, Johnstone speculates that there could be several reasons for this. One possibility is that depressed people have disrupted connections between brain regions and that regulatory instructions from the regulatory center are not sent to the mood center; also, depressed people may dwell on negative thoughts. He said, “When they try to regulate, they think more about what the pictures provoke negative emotions, and instead of minimizing their emotional response, this provokes a bad emotional response.” This study reflects a portion of depressed patients and may help find more appropriate treatment measures, said Davidson, who directed the study. General psychotherapy uses the same strategies as this study that were helpful for specific patients, but in turn increased adverse emotional responses in those with damage to their emotion regulation centers. “Our study shows that there is indeed a subset of depressed patients for whom traditional cognitive therapy is not appropriate and that other therapeutic interventions may be effective and require further research.” The focus on the role of the brain’s emotion regulation loop could also be helpful in developing new treatments for depression and other psychiatric disorders. ”Emotion regulation underlies not only depression, but also many psychiatric disorders.” Davidson says, “If we understand the importance of the brain’s circuitry and how it regulates mood, we will develop more targeted treatments.”