Slower cardiac-coupled cortical dynamics link depressive symptoms to inflexible affective updating

Abstract

Depression is marked by blunted affective responses to context, which interoceptive accounts trace to altered neural representations of bodily states. Yet this evidence mainly concerns response magnitude, not how quickly affect is updated when contexts change. Here we tested whether depressive symptom severity is related to delayed affective updating, and whether cortical dynamics tracking cardiac states account for this delay. To this end, we applied a movie-watching paradigm with independently defined contextual shifts, continuous affect ratings, electroencephalography, and electrocardiography in individuals spanning a continuum of depressive symptoms. Combining deep representation learning and a dynamical systems framework, we quantified how quickly (speed) and how sharply (angle) cardiac-coupled cortical representations reorganized at each shift. Greater symptom severity predicted longer latency to enter the context-congruent affective state across contextual shifts, regardless of valence. In a cross-sectional mediation analysis, slower speed, but not angle, accounted for this association. This mediation was specific to depressive symptoms, contextual shifts, and cardiac-coupled neural dynamics. These findings extend the embodied account of depression from blunted affective intensity toward its inflexible updating at moments of contextual shift, and offer a broadly applicable framework for quantifying brain-body dynamics across affective dysfunctions.