Early Life Adversity and Affective Dynamics: Integrating EMA And Multimodal MRI To Understand Depression Risk - Project Summary/Abstract: Early life adversity (e.g., maltreatment; exposure to neighborhood violence) significantly increases depression; this includes episodes, reoccurrence, and symptoms of depression, as well as reducing efficacy of common treatments for this disorder. Despite being well-studied and well-replicated, the exact mechanisms mediating these linkages remain unclear. Here, we will examine if behavioral and neural variations related to positive affect are impacted by early life adversity and contribute to depressive symptoms. Specifically, the proposed project will (1) determine if there’s a reduction in the behavioral persistence or intensity of positive affect for youth exposed to adversity, (2) probe if individual differences in neural reactivity (persistence and intensity) relate to adversity and positive affect, and (3) interrogate if sex moderates neural and behavioral dynamics related to positive affect. To probe these questions, we will use: a) well-validated measures of early life adversity and depression; b) an affective film viewing paradigm, c) ecological momentary assessments (EMA) to measure real-world emotional responses and d) a multimodal MRI session. Particularly unique, EMA will include two, intermixed experience-sampling phases: baseline and game. The game phase will allow our team to experimentally manipulate positive affect in our participants, measuring affective reactivity and the duration of real-world affect in response to the game. We hypothesize that overall levels of positive affect, as well as the persistence of positive affect after an experimental manipulation, will be diminished in youth exposed to high levels of adversity. Neurobiologically, positive affect is related to the integrity of the corticostriatal circuit, as the function and connectivity of the ventral striatum (VS) and portions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are critical to appropriate responses to rewarding and motivationally salient stimuli in one’s environment. We will deploy cutting-edge neuroimaging analytics to examine the reactivity dynamics of multiple critical corticostriatal hubs (e.g., VS; portions of PFC), with a specific interest in the amplitude and width of neural responsivity (to understand persistence and intensity of neural responses). We predict that childhood adversity will be associated with an inability to sustain corticostriatal reactivity. Examined collectively, this novel project affords an opportunity to identify critical behavioral and neural mechanisms connected to adversity-related depression risk. With an inability to sustain positive affect being a hallmark of depression, these results would suggest new mechanisms about how adversity may contribute to mood dysregulation. Sustained progress on this issue could produce insights that practitioners could use in reducing the negative mental health consequences of early life adversity.
