The Brain Structure Foundation Of Automatic Thinking And Influencing Factors

The depression was broadly defined as a syndrome including the psychological and somatic symptoms such as the anhedonia or sad mood, plus a combination of additional impaired concentration, fatigue, worthlessness and suicidal ideation. In addition, depression had been associated with the mental and social factors as the life stress, the attachment bond, the negative self-concept and the guilt. The negative automatic thought was a characteristic of depression which contributed to the risk for episode of depression. The ATQ measured the negative automatic thoughts (self-statements) popping into their head in daily life. These negative thoughts associated with maladaptive metal pressure, inferiority and arbitrary behavior, and the psychological process was an important potential factor to develop depression. Beck’s cognitive theory argued that depression and negative life events interacted with each other through two levels of cognitive:cognitive maladjustment attitude and automatic thinking; this two levels of cognitive was one of the important factors to develop depression. Among them, cognitive maladjustment attitude was relatively stable, characteristics of cognitive vulnerability; The automatic thinking was not stable, context dependent cognitive. Some scholars think that cognitive maladjustment attitude was a mediator of the negative life events, and the relationship between automatic thoughts and depression was more direct and close. ATQ could effectively distinguish between depression and nonclinical depression patients, some argued that Hamilton depression rating scale and The Beck Depression Inventory were mainly designed for people with depression, for non-clinical populations, ATQ was a high sensitive, reliability and validity scale to measure atypical features of depression.Study1aimed to study the abnormalities in brain structure before the depressive episode instead after episode, which was important for the early detection and prevention for the disease. Evidence suggested that gray and white matter abnormalities were linked with depression, but little was known about the association between the negative cognitive experience and brain structure in preclinical depression. It was noteworthy that, many published depressive studies had reported some results of the relatively small sample sizes and the objects of the studies were mostly the identified group of the depression. In accordance with the regular developing pattern of the mental health, developing from the healthy state into the mental disorders, this VBM study was the first study on the evolving changes of the brain structure on preclinical depression measured by the questionnaire ATQ. The purpose of the present study was to examine the ATQ and the regional gray/white matter volume by applying VBM method with brain MR images of309healthy individuals. Based on some previous studies, we hypothesized that there might be some structure changes in regions about the emotional process, automatic thought and the cognitive experiences such as the limbic system, hippocampal system and corpus callosum. In addition, we inferred that the white matter changes were accompanied by gray matter alterations.We collected ATQ and brain magnetic resonance image data from309healthy college students, using Matlab software to analyses the association between ATQ scores and brain’s gray/white matter structure. The results showed that after controlling for gender, age and global GM volumes, ATQ scores were positively correlated with the gray matter volume in a cluster that mainly included areas in the right parahippocampal gyrus and right fusiform gyrus. In addition, after controlling for gender, age and global WM volumes, the ATQ scores were negatively correlated with the white matter volume in a cluster that mainly in the areas of the corpus callosum. Meanwhile, a positive correlation fall short of significance in the ATQ scores with the white matter volume in a cluster that mainly included areas in the superior part of right temporal pole.The results implied that the parahippocampal gyrus might confer a protective effect against potentially harmful events or experiences. As part of the limbic system, the parahippocampal gyrus might be influenced by the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), which responded with the hyper-glucocorticoid level when facing the inadaptation. CC was cooperated with the parahippocampal gyrus or the hippocampal system to regulate the stress or maladjustment by integrating interhemispheric information. The reduction of the CC in the subclinical depressed population might due to the changes in the hyper-glucocorticoid level or the myelin-oligodendrocyte system. The superior temporal pole played an important role in the inner language processing about the negative thought. Furthermore, as part of the temporal pole, the increased superior temporal pole was associated with the emotional regulation during the occurence of the negative thought and influenced by the HPA as the parahippocampal gyrus.Study2would discuss wheather the relationship between automatic thinking and brain structure was affected by other factors, negative automatic thinking was one of the typical features of depression, and individuals with high trait anxiety also had a high risk for depression, so the study2will discuss anxiety and depression and the relationship between depression (anxiety) and the brain mechanism of automatic thinking. Trait anxiety was a kind of personality traits. It reflects regular anxiety experience, it was a relatively stable and persistent anxiety tendency. It was a kind of stable behavior, it would not change as time and places changes. As for anxiety and depression, these two disorders could be differentiated on the basis of factors specific to each symptom although they shared a substantial component of general emotional distress. The relationship between anxiety and depression had been discussed in many research, researchers argued that people with high level anxiety would be more likely to have depression disorder at the same time. This article used SPSS software to analyze the relationship among anxiety (depression), parahippocampal gyrus and automatic thought. The results showed that trait anxiety partially mediated between parahippocampal gyrus and automatic thought. But there was no significant results between depression and automatic thought. This results indicated that trait anxiety might plan an important role in shaping the automatic thought processing.This research adopted the college students groups and their age distribution did not conformed to the social normal distribution, these restrictions would affect the result currency. However, study1showed that a higher scores in nonclinical people with depression had some vulnerable brains, which had the vital significance to provide certain reference to predict depression conditions, early detection and prevention of mental disorders. The deficiency of study2was not further explore other factors between parahippocampal gyrus and automatic thinking, this should be taken into consideration in the future research. In addition, the participants were university students, this is a group who had received the higher education level, and the age range was not wide enough (17-27), it had led to the limitations of this study. In the future study, we should expand the range of the age and the different level of education, it was more advantageous to the results currency.