A new study has found that changes in our brain patterns, which decide how we trust people, can be a sign of depression before we start noticing any obvious symptoms. Just like when your devices show unusual behaviour when they are infected by malware, changes in our trusting behaviours can tell us that we might have depression too.
Doctors used a brain scan to show the link between depression and the smallness of certain parts responsible for social thought. This might help us to spot people who are at risk of getting depression early on. The results were posted in a journal called Scientific Reports.
Alan S. R. Fermin from Hiroshima University’s Center for Brain, Mind and KANSEI Sciences Research asked a question: Can we use social personality information to predict mental illnesses such as depression? He believes that having tools that help to identify early signs of mental disorders can help us get help faster.
Major depressive disorder (or clinical depression) is a very serious mental health issue that affects millions of people all over the world. Unfortunately, many people don’t seek help as soon as they should due to various reasons and this usually leads to their condition getting worse. When symptoms are already present and severe, it’s easier for doctors to diagnose depression but it can be more difficult to treat because response to medications could be reduced. This means that the treatment might need to be more aggressive in order to be effective.
This new study confirmed that there could be a link between trust and feeling depressed. In addition, they were the first to find out a scientific reason why this may be true.
Trusting people isn’t always easy because not everyone is kind or helpful. In different places, like school or home, you might come across people who gossip, bully, harass you, or even hurt you. Failing to trust other people and having these bad experiences can really hurt your mental health and make it harder for you to interact with others which makes depression worse.
Our research showed that if someone has low trust, then they may have depression. Furthermore, we found that certain parts of the brain that impact trust also affect how much someone would suffer from depression in the next year.
We discovered that people with low-trust levels had smaller amounts of gray matter in areas of their brains used for understanding other people. Furthermore, this decrease in the amount of gray matter was similar to that of persons diagnosed with depression. This means that individuals who hadn’t received any type of mental disorder still exhibited signs and symptoms associated with depression.
Researchers have found that when you’re feeling low trust and have high depression symptoms, your brain’s gray matter volume decreases in areas like the bilateral angular gyrus, bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left posterior cingulate cortex, bilateral precuneus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and right frontal pole. In addition to this, if you don’t feel a lot of trust the gray matter in the parahippocampus-amygdala region also shrinks.
Relevant brain parts help people control their feelings, make decisions and guess the thoughts of others. Low trusters have lesser sizes in these brain sections which can cause depression. We don’t know why this happens yet.
To figure out the connection in our brains between trust and depression, researchers used special scans to examine the gray matter of 470 people from a place called Machida, near Tokyo. They also asked these participants different questions about trust, social anxiety, and how big their circles of friends were. Lastly, they had them fill out a quiz about any depression issues they might be having to find out if they have Major Depression Disorder (MDD).
Researchers recruited 185 people who were visiting medical institutions in Hiroshima Prefecture to validate their findings. They studied grey matter volume abnormalities from 81 of the participants that had been diagnosed with depression to find out if brain regions connected to trust and feeling down are associated with physical changes commonly found in people with MDD.
The researchers want to find out if certain personalities can tell us when someone might get a mental disorder. They also want this research to help create policies that could make it easier for people to trust each other and prevent mental illness.
Researchers have studied how our brains affect our experiences with depression. They recently published a paper called “The Neuroanatomy of Social Trust Predicts Depression Vulnerability” in Scientific Reports on the 6th of October 2022. This study found that by understanding how the brain works, we may be able to understand why some people are more sensitive to depression than others.
Researchers from HU’s Center for Brain, Mind and Kansei Sciences Research, Aoyama Gakuin University’s School of Social Informatics, Tamagawa University’s Brain Science Institute, Riken Center for Brain Science’s Unit focused on Social Value Decisions, and Araya Inc.’s Neuroinformatics Department all worked together on this study.
This study was funded by three different organizations – the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, and the Moonshot Research and Development Program.
