Anhedonia severity mediates the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting during music listening

Abstract

Recent studies have reported atypical emotional processing in individuals with greater levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. However, the relationship between brain networks dynamics and moment-to-moment affective responses to naturalistic paradigms, as emotions are unfolding, remains unclear. In this study, we used the unique temporal characteristics of music to investigate behavioural and brain network dynamics as a function of anhedonic depressive symptoms severity in healthy adults during an emotionally provocative music listening task. Thirty-one neurotypical participants aged 18-30 years were required to continuously rate happy, neutral and sad pieces of music whilst undergoing MRI scanning. They were also asked to fill in questionnaires assessing their levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. Using a novel fMRI analysis method called Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (LEiDA), we found an increased probability of occurrence of attentional networks and a blunted emotional response to both happy and sad pieces of music in participants with greater levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. More specifically, anhedonic depressive symptoms mediated the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting. Furthermore, the elevated recruitment of attentional networks during emotional pieces of music carried over into subsequent neutral music. Future studies are needed to investigate whether these findings could be generalised to a clinical population (i.e., Major Depressive Disorder).