Have you ever gone through a period of feeling down and no matter what anyone tried to do, it did not cheer you up? This mood may have made your favourite food not seem as tasty or your favourite pastime not as fun. People vary in personality, and they are typically categorized by how they respond to these negative feelings. They are considered positive when they are able to look on the bright side of the situation, and negative when they focus on the depressing feelings. Research has now discovered that there may be more to having positive mental resilience than just a person’s perspective on life.
Psychological testing on adolescents exposed to child abuse has been conducted to determine how they respond to a rewarding stimulus, and if their response indicates how their levels of depression will change over time. Childhood abuse has been strongly associated with depression, which typically contains symptoms such as not enjoying the typical things that people find rewarding. These rewards are things such as money or positive social interaction. A study by Dennison et al., (2016) had survivors of child abuse view negative, neutral, and positive images in an attempt to find areas of the brain which changed activity levels with the change of the emotion in the presented images. The purpose of the pictures was to compare the response individuals had to emotionally rewarding positive images, to neutral and non-rewarding images. To measure the changes in the brain, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine was used. The fMRI machine tracks the blood flow in a brain while a person is processing information. As a particular part of the brain becomes more active it needs more glucose, which is a type of sugar, and oxygen to continue functioning. The brain receives blood and glucose by increasing blood flow to the areas of need. They travel within the blood to reach their destination at the active brain area. A visual of the amount of blood and the location of the blood flow is created using the fMRI machine. In this study the children were shown to have increased blood flow activity in the basal ganglia when viewing positive images compared to when they viewed neutral or negative images. The basal ganglia is a group of structures located deep within the brain of humans. The function of this area of the brain is to control processes such as decision making and motivation.
The results of the fMRI was compared with the development of depressive symptoms of the abused children both during the original testing, and two years after their initial brain scan. It was discovered that there was a relationship between the blood flow to specific areas of the basal ganglia, and the severity of depression symptoms over time. Depression only developed in abused children who had low reactivity to the positive emotional images. This low reactivity was displayed through fMRI by a decreased flow of blood to areas within the basal ganglia while viewing the positive images. Abused children were also correctly predicted to have increased depression over the two year time period when they displayed low levels of basal ganglia activation during the initial viewings of the positive images.
Research suggests that it is possible to find patterns in the blood flow of a brain that represent an individual’s resilience to depression after childhood abuse. In order to discover potential techniques to prevent depression in individuals who suffered traumatic experiences, the processes in the brains of individuals who survived traumatic experiences without depression can be studied. The common processes in the brain of non-depressed individuals can be compared to individuals who became depressed after traumatic experiences to determine the differences. Researchers can use these differences to form a depression intervention. In this study it was determined that children who had a larger response to the positive rewarding stimuli are more resilient to the feeling of depression compared to the children who did not have this activity. This suggests that a higher amount of blood flow to the basal ganglia was associated with higher levels of depression resilience. This approach could potentially be used to intervene in future cases so other individuals become more resilient to depression This research also provides future researchers with the knowledge on what areas of the brain to target when considering depression resilience experimentation.
Source:
Dennison, M. J., Sheridan, M. A., Busso, D. S., Jenness, J. L., Peverill, M., Rosen, M. L., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2016). Neurobehavioral markers of resilience to depression amongst adolescents exposed to child abuse. Journal Of Abnormal Psychology, 125(8), 1201-1212. doi:10.1037/abn0000215
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