Social Dysfunction and Neural Processing of Emotional Valence Across Depressive and Anxiety Disorders

Figures

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  Figure 1. Flowchart detailing the data selection procedure.

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  Figure 2. Time course of stimulus presentation for the implicit emotional faces task during the scanning session. ISI, interstimulus interval. Figure adapted from Braak et al. [30].

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  Figure 3. Negative valence system activation. (a) The following contrast was used for task activation: overall negative emotional valence (angry + sad + fearful emotional faces) > scrambled faces. Significant task activation in the bilateral amygdala, hippocampus, fusiform cortex, right frontal gyrus, and right orbitofrontal cortex. Threshold z = 3.1 for activation clusters (x = −42, y = −4, z = −18), overlaid on Montreal Neurological Institute 152 2 mm template. (b) The violin plot shows the distribution of the mean neural activation of the significant cluster within the bilateral amygdala in response to overall negative affect stimuli for each group. COM, comorbid depressive and anxiety disorder; ANX, anxiety disorder; DEP, depressive disorder; HC, healthy controls.

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  Figure 4. Positive valence system activation. (a) The following contrast was used for task activation: happy emotional faces > scrambled faces. Significant task activation in the bilateral amygdala, hippocampus, fusiform cortex, bilateral frontal gyrus, and right orbitofrontal cortex. Threshold z = 3.1 for activation clusters (x = −42, y = −4, z = −18), overlaid on Montreal Neurological Institute 152 2 mm template. (b) The violin plot shows the distribution of the mean neural activation of the significant cluster within the right orbitofrontal cortex in response to positive affect stimuli for each group. COM, comorbid depressive and anxiety disorder; ANX, anxiety disorder; DEP, depressive disorder; HC, healthy controls.

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  Figure 5. Mean neural activation in the left angular gyrus in response to sad emotion processing. (a) The sagittal, coronal, and axial views are shown (from left to right) of the significant cluster within the angular gyrus (peak coordinates: x = −54, y = −62, z = 12) wherein higher WHODAS scores were coupled with larger activation differences between sad emotional faces > scrambled faces, across depressive, anxiety, comorbid, and healthy control participants. The heatmap corresponds to z-values, threshold z > 3.1 (FDR corrected) and is overlaid on the Montreal Neurological Institute 152 2 mm template. (b) The violin plot shows the distribution of the mean neural activation of the significant cluster within the angular gyrus for each group. COM, comorbid depressive and anxiety disorder; ANX, anxiety disorder; DEP, depressive disorder; HC, healthy controls.

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  Figure 6. Social dysfunction and sad emotion processing. The partial regression plot provides a quantitative visualization of the association between social dysfunction and sad emotion processing, wherein mean neural responses to sad emotional faces across all voxels of the cluster in the left angular gyrus (peak coordinates: x = −54, y = −62, z = 12) (y-axis) are plotted against WHODAS social dysfunction scores (x-axis). The values on the x- and y-axes are residuals after correcting for diagnosis, age, sex, years of education, and scan site. Higher scores on the x-axis indicate more severe social dysfunction and higher scores on the y-axis indicate larger activation differences between sad emotional faces > scrambled faces. The black solid line depicts the slope of the association across the whole sample, with the gray band indicating the 95% confidence interval of the slope.