Global synchrony moderates sad mood and is associated with emotional Stroop interference and somatic symptoms

Mood-congruent attention in depression has been studied via emotional interference tasks, including tasks comparing responses to sad and happy stimuli. Mood induction offers a way to experimentally induce sad mood in non-clinical samples and examine its association with subsequent emotional interference, including Sad-Happy interference. Previous studies have separately linked resting-state global neural dynamics (synchrony, metastability) to depressive symptoms and attentional processing. However, whether individual differences in baseline global synchrony and metastability relate to how individuals respond to sad mood remains largely unclear. This study therefore examined the relationship between neural dynamics, sadder mood after induction, and Sad-Happy interference. Depressive symptoms also encompass somatic domains alongside cognitive-affective domains, though these are rarely distinguished in neuroimaging studies. We further examined whether baseline neural dynamics and their association with sadder mood and Sad-Happy interference were related to depressive symptoms (total, cognitive-affective, and somatic). Forty-eight non-clinical individuals completed resting-state neuroimaging, mood induction (sad or non-sad), and an emotional Stroop task. We found in a cross-sectional moderated mediation model that sadder mood after induction was associated with greater interference from sad compared to happy stimuli at medium and high levels of global synchrony, particularly in exploratory path models that included somatic symptoms. Findings suggest that individual differences in resting-state global synchrony may be a neural correlate of sadder mood after induction and Sad-Happy interference in non-clinical individuals. This study offers preliminary associations linking neural dynamics, sad mood, emotional interference, and somatic symptoms, providing insights into the role of neural dynamics in emotional and attentional processing.