Dorsolateral Prefrontal Activation in Emotional Autobiographical Task in Depressed and Anxious College Students: An FNIRS Study

Overview

Journal Int J Environ Res Public Health

Publisher MDPI

Specialties Environmental Health
Public Health

Date 2022 Nov 11

PMID 36361214

Authors

Yan Zhang

Xiaoqin Li

Ying Guo

Zhe Zhang

Fang Xu

Nian Xiang

Min Qiu

Qiang Xiao

Pu Wang

Hui Shi

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objective: The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is strongly associated with mood symptoms. This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to explore the features of brain neural activity in the dlPFC of anxious and depressed college students, during an emotional autobiographical memory task, and to understand the differences in brain cognitive mechanisms caused by anxiety and depression.

Methods: A simple random sampling method was used to test 440 college students at a university with a healthy control group (HC, 220 participants), a pure depression group (PD, 92 participants), and a pure anxiety group (PA, 128 participants). The average oxyhemoglobin in the dlPFC of the subjects during the emotional autobiographical memory task was collected by a 53-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging device.

Results: The activation of the left dlPFC (ch13) in the pure depression group was significantly higher than in the pure anxiety group. The activation of the right dlPFC (ch48) was significantly higher under positive emotions than under negative emotions. The interaction between emotion valence and group was marginally significant, and the activation of the right dlPFC (ch41) in the pure depression group was significantly higher under positive emotion than in negative emotion. The activation of the pure depression group under positive emotions was significantly higher than that of the pure anxiety group. In comparison, the activation of the pure depression group under negative emotions was significantly lower than that of the healthy control group. The results of correlation analysis showed that the activation of the left dlPFC (ch13) was significantly negatively correlated with anxiety in positive emotions, but the activation of the right dlPFC (ch34, ch42) was significantly positively correlated with anxiety in positive and negative emotions.

Conclusions: The right dlPFC was insensitive to positive emotions in college students with high-anxiety symptoms, whereas this region was insensitive to negative emotions in college students with high depressive symptoms, which might be one of the critical differences in the cognitive mechanisms of anxiety and depression. Furthermore, left and right dlPFC activation correlated differently with anxiety. The higher the anxiety level, the lower the activation on the left side, and the higher the activation on the right side. The results suggested that anxiety might reduce the function of the left dlPFC.

Citing Articles

A free association semantic task for fNIRS-based perinatal depression assessment.

Chen D, Yang X, Liang Y, Huang C, Zhang S, Li Y Front Neurol. 2025; 15:1491923.

PMID: 39882372 PMC: 11778336. DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2024.1491923.

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