Study: Depressed Brains May Hate Differently

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TUESDAY, October 4, 2011 (Health.com) — Depressed people are often withdrawn and antisocial. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t like other people, but it could mean that their brains don’t process feelings of hate in a normal way, a new study suggests.

Scientists in China and the UK scanned the brains of people with and without depression, and they found a surprising pattern in nearly all of the depressed people: Their brain activity was out of sync in three regions collectively known as the “hate circuit”—so called because in previous experiments they have been shown to light up when people look at photographs of someone they can’t stand.

“We were a bit shocked when we first saw these results,” says lead researcher Jianfeng Feng, a professor of computer science at the University of Warwick who specializes in biology. Feelings of self-hatred are a common feature of depression, he explains, so one would expect those feelings to also be more intense when directed toward other people.

Instead, it’s as if the brains of depressed people hate incorrectly. The brain disruptions the researchers observed could be a sign that people with depression have an impaired ability to cope with—and learn from—social situations in which they feel hate, Feng says. This may explain why they often turn emotions such as hatred and anger inward, instead of handling them in more constructive ways, he adds.

The study, which was published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to connect disruptions in the hate circuit to depression, and the findings may help doctors understand why depressed people react the way they do to certain circumstances, says Madhkar Trivedi, MD, director of the mood disorders program and clinic at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

“These patients start doubting themselves and they withdraw from social situations,” says Dr. Trivedi, who was not involved in the study. “The hate circuit might have something to do with that.”

Discoveries like this warrant a good deal of interest, Trivedi says, though he cautions that the results are preliminary. “It is exciting when something is this novel and this promising, but…I would of course like to see some results replicated by other researchers,” he says.

Next page: Disruptions found in 92% of depressed people