Altered Interpersonal Neural Synchronization during Social Interaction After Shared Excluded Experiences in Depressed Adolescents

BackgroundMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is common in adolescents, and the special development stage, during which adolescents brain and neuroendocrine system develop intensively, makes it subtly difficult to develop prevention and treatment strategies for depressed adolescents compared with depressed adults. Meanwhile, public psychosocial stressors significantly influence adolescents mental health and social interaction, rendering it essential to explore how a shared psychosocial stressor, i.e., shared excluded experiences, influences social interaction in depressed adolescents. MethodsWe designed a 4-player cyberball game to probe adolescents responses to shared excluded experiences and explore the underlying interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). ResultsWe found that shared excluded experiences could enhance adolescents social interaction preferences but decreased INS in each pair of excluded adolescents, which indicates a reduced willingness to interact with others after the exclusion. However, no significantly different behavioral responses to the shared excluded experiences were found in depressed adolescents compared to adolescents as healthy controls (HC). Further analyses revealed that adolescents with MDD experienced more negative feelings than HC after exclusion. Of note, adolescents with MDD demonstrated stronger INS than HC, indicating the potential empathic stress in depressed adolescents. In addition, there existed altered brain-behavioral association patterns in responses to shared excluded experiences in depressed adolescents. ConclusionsIn summary, our study gives us deeper insights into how a shared psychosocial stressor impacts the INS in depressed adolescents, and it might be demonstrated that INS could be more sensitive than behavioral responses to detect social interaction deficits in depressed adolescents.