Lost emotion: Disrupted brain-based tracking of dynamic affective episodes in anxiety and depression

In our day-to-day lives we are confronted with dynamic sensory inputs that elicit a continuously evolving emotional response. Insight into the brain basis of the dynamic nature of emotional reactivity may be critical for understanding chronic symptoms of anxiety and depression. Here, individuals with generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and healthy controls watched a video with dynamic affective content while fMRI activity was recorded. Across all participants there was a large-scale tracking of affective content in emotion processing regions and the default mode network. Anxious and depressed individuals displayed less brain-based coupling within these regions and the extent of this uncoupling correlated with variability in emotional numbing. Thus, abnormal neural tracking of affective information during dynamic emotional episodes appears to represent a disconnection between affective cues in the environment and an individual's response to these cues—providing a putative neural basis for context insensitive affective reactivity and emotional numbing.