Reduced Real-life Affective Well-being and Amygdala Habituation in Unmedicated Community Individuals at Risk for Depression and Anxiety

Background: Early identification of risk for depression and anxiety disorders is important for prevention, but real-life affective well-being and its biological underpinnings in the population remain understudied. Here, we combined methods from epidemiology, psychology, ecological momentary assessment, and functional magnetic resonance imaging to study real-life and neural affective functions in individuals with subclinical anxiety and depression from a population-based cohort of young adults.
Methods: We examined psychological measures, real-life affective valence, functional magnetic resonance imaging amygdala habituation to negative affective stimuli, and the relevance of neural readouts for daily-life affective function in 132 non–help-seeking community individuals. We compared psychological and ecological momentary assessment measures of 61 unmedicated individuals at clinical risk for depression and anxiety (operationalized as subthreshold depression and anxiety symptoms or a former mood or anxiety disorder) with those of 48 nonrisk individuals and 23 persons with a mood or anxiety disorder. We studied risk-associated functional magnetic resonance imaging signals in subsamples with balanced sociodemographic and image quality parameters (26 nonrisk, 26 at-risk persons).
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Results: Compared with nonrisk persons, at-risk individuals showed significantly decreased real-life affective valence (p = .038), reduced amygdala habituation (familywise error–corrected p = .024, region of interest corrected), and an intermediate psychological risk profile. Amygdala habituation predicted real-life affective valence in control subjects but not in participants at risk (familywise error–corrected p = .005, region of interest corrected).
Conclusions: Our data suggest real-life and neural markers for affective alterations in unmedicated community individuals at risk for depression and anxiety and highlight the significance of amygdala habituation measures for the momentary affective experience in real-world environments.