Functional connectivity of reflective and brooding rumination in depressed and healthy women.

Ruminative thinking is related to an increased risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) and perpetuates negative mood states. Rumination, uncontrollable negative thoughts about the self, may comprise both reflective and brooding components. However, only brooding rumination is consistently associated with increased negativity bias and negative coping styles, while reflective rumination has a less clear relationship with negative outcomes in healthy and depressed participants.

Differences in the neural correlates of affective responses in depressed and healthy women.

We aimed to characterize the extent to which there were differences in neural activation between female participants who were diagnosed with or without depression while viewing negative and neutral imagery. The study enrolled 105 medication-free, right-handed female participants between 17 and 63 years who met criteria for current Major Depressive Disorder (n=47) or no prior psychiatric diagnoses (n=58). All participants completed a clinical assessment and underwent a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scan while responding to an implicit affect task that required them to identify the location of ideographs embedded in one of four corners of each valenced image.

Neural substrates of negativity bias in women with and without major depression.

Background: The functional localization of negativity bias, an influential index of emotion information processing, has yet to be identified.

Method: Depressed (n=47) and healthy participants (n=58) completed a clinical interview for DSM-IV Axis I disorders, symptom checklists, a behavioral task to measure negativity bias, and then viewed positive and negative images of social and nonsocial scenes during an event-related fMRI task. Two subsamples of participants with high (i.

Resting-state functional connectivity in women with Major Depressive Disorder.

Objective: Limited research has focused on whole-brain functional connectivity in a well-characterized sample of subjects with current Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). We aimed to investigate resting-state functional connectivity and the extent to which this is correlated with depression severity in unmedicated depressed subjects without comorbidities.

Methods: We utilized Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to investigate whole-brain functional connectivity in a sample of healthy controls (n = 26) and unmedicated subjects diagnosed only with current MDD (n = 20).