What is it about?
This study shows that remitted patients with previous depression have difficulties to down-regulate amygdala activity to negative emotional stimuli, which healthy controls can easily do. The patients don't have problems with regulating positive emotion or with using distraction as a regulation strategy. Habitual reappraisal use in everyday life correlated with the capacity for amygdala downregulation success.
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Why is it important?
The findings in remitted patients with previous episodes of major depression suggest that altered emotion regulation is a trait-marker for depression. It may be one cause for the vulnerability of the patients even in remission and the high relapse rates. This means that emotion regulation, reappraisal specifically, should be a specific target for therapeutic intervention.
Perspectives
One of the astonishing findings for me is the ecologic validity of the amygdala regulation deficit, evidenced by the correlation to habitual regulation problems. It really argues for a profound reappraisal deficit and I would love to see a study linking that directly to relapse probability.
Philipp Kanske
Technische Universitat Dresden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Neural correlates of emotion regulation deficits in remitted depression: The influence of regulation strategy, habitual regulation use, and emotional valence, NeuroImage, July 2012, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.089.
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