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Women who have experienced depression have an activity of the brain that is different from that of women who have never lived when they are criticized by their mothers, according to a study from Harvard University published in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging .

A research include it immediately, which we consider questionable from the standpoint of ethics and shocking as it intervenes in the family relationships of the participants.

Participants who have experienced depression reported feeling completely well and be completely restored but their neural activity was more like that which has been observed in people with depression in other studies.

Jill M. Hooley, researcher in psychology, and colleagues conducted the study with 23 women of whom 12 had no history of depression and 11 reported one or more episodes of depression, but reported no symptoms for 20 months on average.

While images of brain activity were taken using a scanner (fMRI), participants listened to an audio recording of comments about them from their mother. Some comments were positive, others were negative and neutral. The comments were recorded on the phone with the permission of the mother. The researchers made sure that these criticisms were not too extreme and had already been expressed to the participants.

Although participants with a history of depression reported reactions similar to those aware of the participants without a history, their brain activity was different.

While those without a history of depression showed increased activity in regions involved in cognitive control of emotions (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex), those who showed no history of increased activity in these regions but rather in the amygdala, a region responsible for emotional response to threatening situations. Previous research had shown a similar activity in these systems during the depression.

If this type of brain activity precedes depression or whether it represents something of a cerebral scar a past episode is still unknown.

Previous research has shown that living in a home environment where there is a lot of criticism increases the rate of relapse into depression. That raises even more the question of the ethics of this research in our opinion, although the researchers claimed to have ensured that all participants feel comfortable leaving the experiment.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

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