Brain Study Could Lead To New Understanding Of Depression

�Brain scientists have touched a step closer to understanding wherefore some people may be more prone to depression than others.


Dr Roland Zahn, a clinical neuroscientist in The University of Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, and his colleagues have identified how the brain golf links knowledge about social behaviour with moral sentiments, such as pride and guilt.


The study, carried out at the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the US with Dr Jordan Grafman, headman of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section, and Dr Jorge Moll, now at the LABS-D'Or Center for Neuroscience in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, secondhand functional magnetised resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 29 level-headed individuals while they considered certain social behaviours.


The findings published in the journal Cerebral Cortex for the first time chart the regions of the brain that interact to tie-in knowledge around socially allow behaviour with different moral feelings, depending on the context in which the social behaviour occurs.


"During routine life we constantly measure social behaviour and this largely affects how we feel about ourselves and other people," said Dr Zahn. "But the agency we store and role information approximately our possess and other people's social behaviour ar not well understood.


"This up-to-the-minute study victimised functional mastermind imaging to identify the circuits in the nous that underpin our ability to differentiate social behavior that conforms to our values from behaviour that does not."


The team discovered that social behaviour not conforming to an individual's values elicited feelings of anger when carried out by another person or feelings of guilt when the behaviour stemmed from the individuals themselves.


The fMRI scans of each volunteer could then be analysed to see which parts of the brain were activated for the different types of feeling beingness expressed. Of particular interest to Dr Zahn were the brain scans relating to feelings of guilt trip, as these have especial relevance to his electric current work on depression.


"The most distinctive feature of speech of depressive disorders is an exaggerated negative attitude to oneself, which is typically attended by feelings of guiltiness," he said.


"Now that we understand how the brains of healthy individuals respond to feelings of guilt, we hope to be able to better understand why and where thither are differences in brain activity in people suffering from, or prone to, depression.


"The brain region we have identified to be associated with proneness to guilt has been shown to be abnormally active in patients with severe depression in several late studies, merely until now its involvement in guilt feelings had been unknown."


"By translating these basic cognitive neuroscience insights into clinical research we nowadays have the potential to discover new key running anatomical characteristics of the brain that may lie down behind depressive disorders.


"The results will hopefully make an important contribution to our understanding of the causes of depression that volition ultimately reserve new approaches to find oneself better treatments and prevention."


The current clinical study, being carried out with professors Matthew Lambon-Ralph, Bill Deakin and Alistair Burns at The University of Manchester, will last-place four years.


MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

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http://www.manchester.ac.uk



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