fNIRS evidence for valence-dependent prefrontal activation moderating resilience to depression.

BACKGROUND

Psychological resilience，an individual's capacity to adaptively cope with adversity, effectively buffers against depression. This study employed functional Near-Infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during an Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) to investigate prefrontal and temporal cortical hemodynamic differences in university students stratified by resilience levels and their mechanistic impact on depression.

METHODS

Participants (N = 382; 191 high-resilience, 191 low-resilience) completed the AMT while fNIRS recorded Oxyhemoglobin (Oxy-Hb). Data were analyzed using MATLAB-based processing and SPSS22.0, PROCESS v3.2 for ANOVA and moderation modeling.

RESULTS

Repeated measures ANOVA showed high-resilience individuals exhibited significantly higher Oxy-Hb in the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and left Broca's area (BA). We found a group-emotion interaction in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC): high-resilience individuals had higher DLPFC activity during positive memories, while low-resilience individuals showed higher activity during negative memories. Moderation effects showed that during the positive AMT, DLPFC and BA activation enhanced the resilience's depression-buffering effect. In the negative AMT, BA activation weakened this resilience's depression-buffering effect, while frontopolar cortex (FP) activation strengthened it.

CONCLUSION

Resilience levels are characterized by distinct activation patterns in DLPFC, OFC, and BA during emotional autobiographical retrieval. These regions (DLPFC, BA, FP) moderated resilience-depression dynamics through context-dependent neuroregulatory mechanisms, supporting resilience as a neurobiological construct.