Functional Connectivity Among Default Mode, Fronto-Parietal, and Salience Networks Moderates the Lagged Association between Sadness and Rumination in Daily Life

Rumination, the perseverative thinking about one’s problems and emotions, is a maladaptive response to sadness and a risk factor for the development and course of depression. A critical challenge hampering attempts to promote more adaptive responses to sadness is that the between-person characteristics associated with the tendency to ruminate following depressed mood remain uncharacterized. We examine the importance of between-person differences in blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) functional networks underlying cognitive control for the moment-to-moment association between sadness and rumination in daily life. We pair functional magnetic resonance imaging with ambulatory assessments measuring momentary sadness and rumination deployed 10 times per day over 4 consecutive days from 58 participants (40 female, mean age = 36.69 years; 29 remitted from a lifetime episode of Major Depression). Using a multilevel model, we show that rumination increases following increases in sadness for participants with higher than average between-network connectivity of the default mode network and the fronto-parietal network. We also show that rumination increases following increases in sadness for participants with lower than average between-network connectivity of the fronto- parietal network and the salience network. In addition, we find that the flexibility of the salience network’s pattern of connections with brain regions across time is protective against increases in rumination following sadness. Our findings highlight the importance of the neural correlates of cognitive control for understanding maladaptive responses to sadness and also support the value of large-scale functional connectivity networks for understanding cognitive-affective behaviors as they naturally occur during the course of daily life.