Sadness and Depression

By J. Gorman. Oxford Medicine Online, 2018

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two cellular processes are affected by stressful life events: dendritic remodeling and neurogenesis. Dendritic remodeling occurs when dendrites—projections from neurons that receive signals from the axons of other neurons—either grow or retract. Stress causes retraction of dendrites and disrupts brain connections. This may occur when people are depressed and is responsible for the inability of the logical brain to communicate with the emotional brain. Psychotherapy and antidepressant medications may both cause the dendritic tree to grow and restore connections. Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons in the adult brain, which occurs in only a few regions. Neurogenesis is decreased by adverse events and increased by enriched environments and by antidepressant treatments. Thus, cellular brain processes that respond to our environment may underlie depression and other changes in mood.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d504a20939f454a482ae20796e6e31635f3f7513