Altered electroencephalography functional connectivity in depression during the emotional face-word Stroop task

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Depression is a severe mental disorder with unclear neural mechanisms.
• Affective interference, difficulty ignoring negative distractors, is a key feature.
• Understanding brain region connectivity is crucial for depression research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate altered electroencephalography (EEG) functional connectivity in depression patients.
• To reveal neural mechanisms of affective interference using event-related potentials (ERPs) and time series clustering.

Main Methods:

• Collected EEG data from 10 healthy controls and 10 depression patients using a 64-sensor cap.
• Segmented EEG signals into ERP temporal windows.
• Utilized dynamic time warping for inter-electrode signal similarity and hierarchical clustering to identify functional connectivity changes.

Main Results:

• Depression patients exhibited increased long-range functional connections during 400-600 ms (N450 components) compared to controls.
• Abnormal functional connectivity was observed in the superior and middle frontal gyrus, specifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL-PFC).
• The extent of functionally connected regions was larger in depression patients, indicating brain resource reorganization.

Conclusions:

• Findings offer new insights into the neural underpinnings of depression.
• The DL-PFC and specific electrode connections can serve as quantitative indicators for depression.