Neural response during emotion regulation in monozygotic twins at high familial risk of affective disorders

Iselin Meluken,Julian Macoveanu,Phillipe R Goldin,Martina Di Simplicio,Lars Vedel Kessing,Maj Vinberg,Ninja Meinhard Ottesen,Hartwig Roman Siebner,Kamilla Woznica Miskowiak,K Luan Phan

doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2018.11.008

Abstract

PurposeWe investigated the neural correlates of emotion regulation and -reactivity in adult unaffected monozygotic twins with a co-twin history of unipolar or bipolar disorder (high-risk), remitted or partially remitted twins with a personal history of unipolar or bipolar disorder (affected) and twins with no personal or first-degree family history of unipolar or bipolar disorder (low-risk).MethodsWe assessed 37 high-risk, 56 affected and 28 low-risk participants. Participants viewed unpleasant and neutral pictures during functional magnetic resonance imaging and were instructed to down-regulate their emotional response through reappraisal or mental imagery, as well as to maintain the elicited emotion.ResultsAfter adjusting for subsyndromal depressive symptoms, bilateral supplementary motor areas, posterior dorsal anterior cingulate cortices and the left frontal eye field showed less activity during reappraisal of unpleasant pictures in high-risk than low-risk participants. Notably, affected participants did not differ from high-risk or low-risk participants in neural response during reappraisal. There were no group differences in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex seed based functional connectivity during reappraisal or neural response during mental imagery or emotional reactivity.ConclusionLesser response in dorsal midline areas might reflect familial risk related abnormalities during down regulation of emotional reactivity through reappraisal.

Highlights

Impaired emotion regulation and heightened emotional reactivity are common features of unipolar (UD) and bipolar disorders (BD) (Hofmann et al, 2012; Mennin et al, 2007; Nolen-Hoeksema et al, 2008)
We investigated the correlations between blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal and subsyndromal depressive symptoms, emotion ratings during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and to social scenarios outside the scanner
Since we found no main effect of emotion regulation on functional connectivity from the ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) to other brain regions, we decided to not go ahead with the planned group comparisons

Summary

Introduction

Impaired emotion regulation and heightened emotional reactivity are common features of unipolar (UD) and bipolar disorders (BD) (Hofmann et al, 2012; Mennin et al, 2007; Nolen-Hoeksema et al, 2008). Depression is associated with greater use of maladaptive than adaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g. avoidance, rumination and suppression) (Aldao et al, 2010). More selfreported use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and abnormal neural response during automatic regulation of negative affect has been observed in individuals at familial risk of depression 2014), it is unclear whether such genetically predisposed individuals display abnormalities in cognitive and neural measures of voluntary emotion regulation. Unaffected monozygotic (MZ) twins from discordant twin pairs provide a unique measure of familial risk, as they have a very high familial risk given their identical genetic make-up to their affected co-twins (Boomsma et al, 2002). Cross-sectional comparisons between individuals with affective disorder, individuals with familial risk, and individuals without familial risk enable investigation of whether certain

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Conclusion