ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1495821
Different activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left orbitofrontal cortex during autobiographical memory tasks is associated with depressive disorder with different levels of resilience: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hubei Engineering University, Xiaogan, Hubei, China
- 2Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
- 3Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
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Objective: Previous studies have found that resilience is a protective factor against depression, and new antidepressant methods can be developed from the perspective of resilience. However, it remains unclear how resilience protects individuals from depressive symptoms and what neural mechanisms underlie this "protective" effect.We recruited 237 participants in our study according to the depression and anxiety clinical scale (HADS) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), including 100 healthy controls (HADS≤7) and 137 depressed patients (HADS≥8). All participants were evaluated using 53-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to detect cerebral hemodynamic differences during autobiographical memory tasks.The results showed that (1) the activation of oxy-Hb in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was significantly higher in the positive emotional valence condition than in the negative emotional valence condition for the groups of depression-high resilience and healthy-low resilience, while there was no significant difference between the positive and negative emotional valences observed in response to for the groups of depression-low resilience and healthy-high resilience. (2) Oxy-Hb activation under positive emotional valence was significantly higher in the group with healthy-low resilience than healthy-high resilience and depression-low resilience. (3) Under the negative emotional valence condition, resilience mediated the indirect effect of depression on oxy-Hb activation in the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).Conclusions: fNIRS may be a useful tool for diagnosing and characterizing depression in patients with high or low resilience and improving individual resilience 2 may be a new perspective for diagnosing and intervening in depression.
Keywords: Depression, resilience, fNIRS, orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Received: 16 Sep 2024; Accepted: 30 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huifen, Lu, Xiang, Qiu, Da, Xiao, Zhang and Shi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Baoquan Lu, Hubei Engineering University, Xiaogan, 432000, Hubei, China
Yan Zhang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, Hubei Province, China
Hui Shi, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100001, Beijing Municipality, China
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