Unfamiliar Faces: Depression, Trauma, and the Brain
Depression is a debilitating psychological disorder that affects millions of adolescents and remains difficult to treat. One group that is particularly prone to treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is those who suffered a history of abuse. Abuse increases an individual’s risk for depression by altering their social cognition. Researchers hypothesize that these cognitive changes are influenced by alterations in the way an individual’s brain processes faces and emotions, making social interactions more difficult. However, it is unclear how a history of abuse alters regional brain activity during facial expression processing in depressed adolescents. Here we show that abused-depressed individuals exhibited significantly more activity in several brain regions involved in facial expression processing than their depressed-only counterparts while viewing other-faces. We found that a history of abuse significantly increases activity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and insula of depressed individuals while viewing strangers’ facial expressions. Additionally, we observed significantly more activity in the left medial frontal gyrus of abused-depressed participants than their depressed-only counterparts while viewing others’ faces. Our results demonstrate how abused-depressed individuals’ neurobiology differs from their depressed-only counterparts in areas involved in the processing of social cognition while viewing others’ facial expressions. These findings provide insight into the effects of abuse on the function of brain regions involved in the social cognition of adolescents with depression, providing novel neural targets for the development of future TRD therapies.