Depressive Rumination, the Default-Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience

By PhD J. Paul Hamilton, Madison Farmer, Phoebe Fogelman, PhD Ian H. Gotlib. Biological Psychiatry, 2015

876 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The intuitive association between self-focused rumination in major depressive disorder (MDD) and the self-referential operations performed by the brain’s default-mode network (DMN) has prompted interest in examining the role of the DMN in MDD. In this paper we present meta-analytic findings showing reliably increased functional connectivity between the DMN and subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC)—connectivity that often predicts levels of depressive rumination. We also present meta-analytic findings that, while there is reliably increased regional cerebral blood flow in sgPFC in MDD, no such abnormality has been reliably observed in nodes of the DMN. We then detail a model that integrates the body of research presented. In this model, we propose that increased functional connectivity between sgPFC and the DMN in MDD represents an integration of the self-referential processes supported by the DMN with the affectively laden, behavioral withdrawal processes associated with sgPFC—an integration that produces a functional neural ensemble well suited for depressive rumination and that, in MDD, abnormally taxes only sgPFC and not the DMN. This synthesis explains a broad array of existing data concerning the neural substrates of depressive rumination and provides an explicit account of functional abnormalities in sgPFC in MDD.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f517608835392b3793f23bcf658d0baa3cbc589b

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation (2015, background): “Considered without the context provided by self-reports of rumination, sgPFC findings could be related to the neural processing of sadness (20), guilt, remorse, negative autobiographical narratives, or peer rejection (19, 36, 37).”
Reduced default mode network functional connectivity in patients with recurrent major depressive disorder (2019, background): “Our primary results contradict the prevailing notion that DMN FC is increased in MDD (6, 10).”
Rumination and the default mode network: Meta-analysis of brain imaging studies and implications for depression (2020, positive): “Moreover, functional abnormalities in the DMN have been found to be correlated with rumination (Hamilton et al., 2015) as well as with deficient autobiographical memory (Sumner et al.”
Reflecting on rumination: Consequences, causes, mechanisms and treatment of rumination. (2020, background): “, 2009), especially for the more pathological brooding form of rumination (Berman et al., 2011; Bessette et al., 2018; Burkho use et al., 2017; Hamilton et al., 2015; Jacobs et al., 2016; Ordaz et al., 2017; Zhu, Zhu, Shen, Liao , & Yuan, 2017).”