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. 2016 Mar;26(3):933-942.
doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhu255. Epub 2014 Oct 19.

Identification of Mood-Relevant Brain Connections Using a Continuous, Subject-Driven Rumination Paradigm

Anna-Clare Milazzo  1   2 , Bernard Ng  3   4 , Heidi Jiang  5 , William Shirer  6 , Gael Varoquaux  4 , Jean Baptiste Poline  4 , Bertrand Thirion  4 , Michael D Greicius  6
Affiliations

Identification of Mood-Relevant Brain Connections Using a Continuous, Subject-Driven Rumination Paradigm

Anna-Clare Milazzo et al. Cereb Cortex. 2016 Mar.

Abstract

Rumination, an internal cognitive state characterized by recursive thinking of current self-distress and past negative events, has been found to correlate with the development of depressive disorders. Here, we investigated the feasibility of using connectivity for distinguishing different emotional states induced by a novel free-streaming, subject-driven experimental paradigm. Connectivity between 78 functional regions of interest (ROIs) within 14 large-scale networks and 6 structural ROIs particularly relevant to emotional processing were used for classifying 4 mental states in 19 healthy controls. The 4 mental states comprised: An unconstrained period of mind wandering; a ruminative mental state self-induced by recalling a time of personal disappointment; a euphoric mental state self-induced by recalling what brings the subject joy; and a sequential episodic recollection of the events of the day. A support vector machine achieved accuracies ranging from 89% to 94% in classifying pairs of different mental states. We reported the most significant brain connections that best discriminated these mental states. In particular, connectivity changes involving the amygdala were found to be important for distinguishing the rumination condition from the other mental states. Our results demonstrated that connectivity-based classification of subject-driven emotional states constitutes a novel and effective approach for studying ruminative behavior.

Keywords: classification; functional connectivity; resting state; rumination; subject-driven cognition.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy of classifying mental states with an SVM. Dashed line shows an expected accuracy of 50% for random chance. Legend for mental states: H: Happy; R: Rest; Ru: Rumination; M: Memory.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Visualization of Rumination versus Rest brain connections important for discriminating between mental states from Table 1. Connections are overlaid onto a transparent brain for visualization. The center of each ROI is represented by a sphere and the size of the sphere is proportional to the number of connections linked to the ROI. Connections with greater strength during the Rumination state are displayed with a thicker, darker line, and vice versa.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Visualization of Rumination versus Happy brain connections important for discriminating between mental states from Table 1. Connections are overlaid onto a transparent brain for visualization. The center of each ROI is represented by a sphere and the size of the sphere is proportional to the number of connections linked to the ROI. Connections with greater strength during the Rumination state are displayed with a thicker, darker line, and vice versa.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Visualization of Rumination versus Memory brain connections important for discriminating between mental states from Table 1. Connections are overlaid onto a transparent brain for visualization. The center of each ROI is represented by a sphere and the size of the sphere is proportional to the number of connections linked to the ROI. Connections with greater strength during the Rumination state are displayed with a thicker, darker line, and vice versa. MPFC: medial prefrontal cortex; RSC: retrosplenial cortex.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Post hoc functional connectivity paired t-tests with left and right subgenual cingulate seeds showed increased connectivity in the right insula with the right subgenual cingulate seed in the contrast of rumination greater than happy.
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