Depressive Symptoms Are Associated With Altered Development of Amygdala-Ventrolateral Prefrontal Connectivity During...

Adolescence is characterized by extensive development in neural circuits that support emotion processing and regulation and by increased risk for depression. While altered frontolimbic functioning during emotion processing has been implicated in youths with depression relative to healthy control participants, the directions of the associations have been inconsistent.

We examined the longitudinal association between depressive symptoms and frontoamygdala connectivity during implicit regulation of negative emotions (affect labeling) across adolescence in 193 participants (116 girls/77 boys) who completed 4 assessments (ages 9-13 years at baseline), each 2 years apart. We first used latent class mixed modeling to identify classes (groups) with similar trajectories of depressive symptom development. We then conducted generalized additive mixed models to test whether these groups differed in trajectories of amygdala-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) connectivity during negative affect labeling using psychophysiological interaction analysis.

We identified 2 groups: adolescents with consistently lower symptoms (low symptoms) and adolescents with higher and steeper increases in symptoms (high symptoms). These groups differed in their trajectories of right amygdala-left VLPFC connectivity during affect labeling. Right amygdala-left VLPFC connectivity during implicit regulation of negative emotions decreased over time for the high symptoms group, becoming more strongly negative by middle to late adolescence relative to the low symptoms group, for whom connectivity was relatively stable across adolescence.

Functioning of the right amygdala-left VLPFC circuit during implicit emotion regulation might be an age-dependent neurobiological marker and target of intervention for depressive symptoms in adolescence.