Nia Goulden1, Shane McKie1, Emma Pegg1, Darragh Downey2, Rebecca Elliott1, Stephen Ross Williams2, Ian M. Anderson1, John Francis William Deakin1
1Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; 2Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
We applied an effective connectivity analysis to data from healthy control and remitted depressed volunteers who had carried out an emotional face viewing paradigm. We detected differences in bottom-up and top-down processing for viewing emotional faces. There was a differential effect of happy, sad and fearful faces on remitted depressed volunteers with most differences seen during viewing sad faces. During viewing happy and sad faces a difference was seen in the connection from the fusiform gyrus to the amygdala which was also modulated by viewing sad faces. These differences potentially indicate risk factors for depression.