Spatiotemporal unfolding of prefrontal neural response divergence in adolescent depression during naturalistic experience

Abstract

Depression alters how emotional experience is interpreted and regulated, yet how depression-related neural divergence unfolds during ongoing experience remains poorly understood, leaving unresolved whether such divergence reflects stable trait-like abnormalities or state-dependent responses that emerge only at particular moments. This question is especially consequential in adolescence, when depression often emerges amid heightened social sensitivity and continuing maturation of prefrontal regulatory systems. Here, we used naturalistic film watching fMRI data of 36 adolescents with depression and 36 matched controls to map where, how, and when neural responses diverge between diagnostic groups. Neural polarization analysis localized group-level divergence to two prefrontal hubs, the dmPFC-rACC and left dlPFC, where individual similarity to the depression-group response pattern was associated with depressive symptom severity across the cohort. These local divergence sites were not spatially isolated. Seed-based inter-subject functional connectivity showed that they were embedded within distributed stimulus-locked coupling patterns spanning prefrontal control, salience, and subcortical reward circuits. Time-resolved phase synchrony further revealed that this divergence was not continuous, but arose at specific narrative moments, with the dmPFC-rACC diverging during socio-emotional events and the left dlPFC during cognitively demanding ones. Together, these findings move beyond static localization to reveal depression-related neural divergence as a spatially organized, network-embedded, and temporally gated response pattern shaped by the unfolding content of naturalistic experience.