Catrambone, V. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2024

Impaired functional brain-heart interplay sustains emotion dysregulation in depressed individuals

Depression is a leading worldwide cause of mental disorders and disability, strongly affecting emotional processing and regulation. Its dysfunctional psycho-physiological dynamics may be part of the a nervous-system-wise symptomatology, impacting not only patients psyche but also significantly influencing functional cardiovascular dynamics. Therefore, depression serves as an exemplary pathological manifestation of the dysfunctional interaction between the central and autonomic nervous systems. While recent literature has been developing specific techniques to quantify such interactions, often referred to as functional Brain-Heart Interplay (BHI), the quantitative role of BHI dynamics in depression is largely unknown. This study aims to experimentally unveil BHI patterns specific to emotional regulation and processing in subjects exhibiting depressive symptoms compared to healthy controls. Results were gathered from a cohort of 72 individuals and indicate that depressive symptoms are associated with a continuous efferent central-to-peripheral hyperactivity and an afferent peripheral-to-central hypoactivity. This hypoactivity appears to be specific to negative emotional processing. This study offers novel insights into the systemic investigation of the neuro-physiological bases of depression.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Cardiac sympathovagal activity initiates a functional brain-body response to emotional processing

A century-long debate on bodily states and emotions persists. While the involvement of bodily activity in emotion physiology is widely recognized, the specificity and causal role of such activity related to brain dynamics has not yet been demonstrated. We hypothesize that the peripheral neural monitoring and control of cardiovascular activity prompts and sustains brain dynamics during an emotional experience, so these afferent inputs are processed by the brain by triggering a concurrent efferent information transfer to the body. To this end, we investigated the functional brain-heart interplay under emotion elicitation in publicly available data from 62 healthy participants using a computational model based on synthetic data generation of EEG and ECG signals. Our findings show that sympathovagal activity plays a leading and causal role in initiating the emotional response, in which ascending modulations from vagal activity precede neural dynamics and correlate to the reported level of arousal. The subsequent dynamic interplay observed between the central and autonomic nervous systems sustains emotional processing. These findings should be particularly revealing for the psychophysiology and neuroscience of emotions. SignificanceWe investigate the temporal dynamics of brain and cardiac activities in healthy subjects who underwent an emotional elicitation through videos. We demonstrate that, within the first few seconds, emotional stimuli modulate the heart activity, which in turn stimulate an emotion-specific cortical response in the brain. Then, the conscious emotional experience is sustained by a bidirectional brain-heart interplay and information exchange. Moreover, the perceived intensity of an emotional stimulus is predicted by the intensity of neural control regulating the heart activity. These findings may constitute the fundamental knowledge linking neurophysiology and psychiatric disorders, including the link between depressive symptoms and cardiovascular disorders.

neuroscience↗