Neuroimaging studies examining the brains of people with depression or anxiety typically use artificial stimuli, like sad movies or pictures of puppies, to elicit feelings, instead of stimuli that are relevant to the participants’ lives and can trigger more intense emotions.
As a result, it’s not well understood what happens at the neural level when people with depression or anxiety experience the negative emotional states that characterize these mental health disorders—particularly in anticipation of and during stressful events.
A new study at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences seeks to fill in the gaps. By using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to scan the brains of undergraduate students with anxiety or depression as they receive grades on high-stakes exams, the researchers hope to capture the neural dynamics of the strong emotions elicited by real-world events.
“So much of the human neuroscience work on emotion uses what you might call artificial or standardized stimuli that don’t do a great job of evoking real, naturalistic emotion in people.”
Aaron Heller, the Principal Investigator and a Professor in the Department of Psychology
“This project will enable us to understand what is happening in the brain as these students await this really high-stakes, goal-relevant news, as they get it, and as they process it in the immediate aftermath,” explained Aaron Heller, the principal investigator and a professor in the Department of Psychology.
Heller recently received a five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to complete this study. He plans to start collecting data during the Fall 2026 semester in collaboration with Kiara Timpano, a professor in the Department of Psychology who studies anxiety and related affective disorders.
The researchers plan to recruit 144 students—72 with anxiety or depression and 72 without mental health disorders—who are enrolled in chemistry courses with high-stakes exams. Many of the students in these classes are on the premedical track, and doing well on these tests is important for their prospects of getting into medical school.
During the study, the research team will scan the students’ brains five times: once to get baseline measurements and four times before, during, and after they receive exam scores. This will allow the researchers to separate what happens in the students’ brains as they anticipate the event from what happens during their emotional response to the event and immediately afterward.
“My goal is to better understand how the brain is shifting over time, both as you get closer and closer to seeing the grade and after you see the grade, so we can get a sense of whether certain brain states reemerge,” Heller explained.
To do this, the researchers will use Hidden Markov Models—statistical models for capturing shifts between different brain states—to pinpoint when shifts are happening, how extreme they are, and whether certain brain states reemerge.
Timpano said she hopes the study leads to a deeper understanding of how the neural dynamics of anxiety and depression differ and how they overlap.
“I’m excited about the opportunity to better understand why some individuals develop depression versus anxiety,” she said. “This study has the potential to refine how we conceptualize risk and vulnerability for mood and anxiety disorders.”
The research team also includes Mingbo Cai, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, who has expertise in the computational modeling of brain data and will help with the data analysis.
Marc Knecht, chair of the Department of Chemistry, is also involved in the research. He will help coordinate the participation of chemistry faculty members whose students are enrolled in the study.
Heller and Timpano said they hope insights gleaned from the study inform the development of new treatments for anxiety and depression.
Their preliminary findings based on data from pilot subjects, for example, indicate that activity patterns in the hippocampus may drive the recurrence of negative brain states. If the study confirms these preliminary findings, future treatments could target these activity patterns to interrupt the negative emotional states.
“We believe that it’s essential to understand the basic components of these conditions,” Timpano explained. “The more precisely we understand the underlying factors, the better we can build effective treatments.”
(Newswise/HG)
