Timothea Toulopoulou and colleagues have published “The role of altered decision dynamics and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to amygdala causal circuitry in the aberrant efficacy of emotion suppression in subthreshold depression” in Psychological Medicine (January 2026).
People with subthreshold depression, which may be an early stage of major depression, often suppress the outward expression of their emotions. Combining decision-making models with fMRI in two samples, the study examines how this suppression affects emotional judgments and the role of brain circuitry linking the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the amygdala. Understanding this mechanism could inform early interventions for depression.
Authors: Lijing Niu, Timothea Toulopoulou, Xiaoqi Song, Qian Li, Haowei Dai, Keyin Chen, Jiayuan Zhang, Xi Chen, Zini Chen, Xingqin Wang, Delong Zhang, Ruibin Zhang