Negative mood is associated with decreased prefrontal cortex functioning during working memory in young adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prefrontal-subcortical model of emotion regulation postulates that decreased prefrontal cortex (PFC) functioning may underlie the emergence of clinical affective disorders. In addition, accumulated evidence suggests that there is considerable variability in negative affect in the nonclinical population. This study examined whether negative affective symptoms were associated with decreased PFC functioning in nonclinical young adults. Forty college students aged 18-24 years (ten males) underwent an n-back paradigm (i.e., a frontal executive task) with a working memory (WM) load (i.e., 3-back) and a vigilance control condition (i.e., 0-back) while their hemodynamics changes in the lateral and medial PFC on both sides were monitored using a 16-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system. They also filled out the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) to estimate the levels of their negative emotions in the preceding week. Young adults exhibited an increased concentration of oxyhemoglobin and a decreased concentration of deoxyhemoglobin (i.e., activation), primarily in the lateral PFC, in response to the WM load (i.e., 3-back > 0-back). Importantly, higher DASS scores indicating higher levels of recent negative mood, especially depression and stress rather than anxiety symptoms, correlated with lower WM-related activation in the lateral PFC. Thus, recent negative mood is associated with decreased lateral PFC functioning during the executive control of WM in healthy young adults. Our findings suggest that decreased PFC functioning is also present in the nonclinical population with increased levels of negative mood and that fNIRS is a promising tool for elucidating individual differences in negative affective symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".