Imagine watching your favourite film and feeling emotionally disconnected, as if your brain was struggling to engage with what’s on the screen.
I am a postdoctoral research associate at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), and this is what I found in our new study exploring how adolescents with depression process emotional information encountered in everyday life, such as during movie watching.
Using novel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods (brain scans) to track brain activity in real-time as the scenes unfolded, our study uncovered key differences in how the brains of depressed and non-depressed adolescents engage with movie content. And the surprising tool for this discovery? A ten-minute clip from the animated film ‘Despicable Me’.
A new way to explore adolescent depression
Depression in young people can be difficult to understand, and even harder to diagnose. Many adolescents report feeling emotionally numb, but it’s not clear what’s happening in the brain to cause this experience.
Traditional studies have often used static, single-frame images to study emotional processing in depression, such as still pictures of individuals overtly smiling, but such simplified pictures are rarely encountered in real life. Instead, emotional experiences only take on their full meaning in the context of multi-sensory information that evolves over seconds or minutes.
That’s where this new study stands out. We scanned the brains of 84 adolescents (half with diagnosed depression and half without) while they watched a carefully selected clip from ‘Despicable Me’. The clip alternates humorous scenes where the adoptive caregiver, Mr Gru, develops a strong emotional connection with three little girls during bedtime stories, and sad scenes depicting them being taken away from him. By tracking fluctuations in brain activity throughout the movie clip, we could see how the adolescents’ brains reacted in real time to changing emotional content. What we found could help explain why depression feels so exhausting.
What we found
Our brains have two major circuits that help us pay attention to the world around us:
The Dorsal Attention Network (DAN), which helps us consciously focus on things we choose to pay attention to, such as following a movie plot.
The Ventral Attention Network (VAN), which helps us automatically notice unexpected details, such as a sudden change in loudness, brightness, or emotional facial expression.
The study found that adolescents with depression overused the DAN and underused the VAN while watching ‘Despicable Me’. In other words, their brains had to work much harder to consciously make sense of the movie content, while struggling to naturally respond to unexpected changes in the scenes. And this effect was strongest during neutral scenes when nothing dramatic was happening.
This suggests that the brains of depressed adolescents weren’t just reacting differently to overtly emotional moments but were also struggling to process more subtle, everyday social cues when the emotional content was more neutral and less emotionally intense.
Why does this matter?
Even though adolescents with depression might not outwardly show strong emotional reactions, their brains are putting in extra effort to process what’s happening around them, while being less likely to pick up on unexpected changes in their surroundings.
This more effortful and less flexible way of handling emotions suggests that the depressed brain often misjudges how much energy it needs to make sense of its surroundings, even in situations without strong emotional content. Over time, this inefficient use of energy resources can lead to a general shutdown of the system, making it difficult for them to engage with the outside world, along with feelings of exhaustion and emotional numbness often reported in depression.
Our study also highlights the importance of exploring how depressed adolescents navigate transitions between contexts of varying emotional intensity, rather than only focusing on their responses to highly intense emotional cues.
This opens up exciting avenues for future research. In fact, our results support our previous findings revealing similar changes in the same brain circuits in healthy participants who experience a lack of pleasure (anhedonia). In that study, unusual brain activity was most noticeable when participants listened to neutral music. Instead of relaxing after the emotional highs and lows of happy or sad music, their DAN remained unusually active. This difficulty in smoothly transitioning between emotional states at the brain level was linked to a flat emotional response at the behavioural level, where participants reported little difference in how they felt during happy, sad, or neutral music, indicating a more disengaged pattern of emotional reactivity overall. This is in line with depressive individuals’ accounts of feeling emotionally numb, disconnected from their emotions and perceiving the world as dull, empty and always the same.
A fresh perspective on depression
Our findings essentially challenge traditional views of depression, suggesting that scientists need to look beyond responses to intense emotional cues and pay more attention to the difficulties depressed adolescents may face in everyday neutral moments.
By using ‘Despicable Me’ as a simple yet engaging tool, this study sheds light on a hidden challenge that many depressed adolescents face. Understanding how this unusual pattern of brain activity extends to other everyday social interactions, beyond movie watching, and why the brain struggles particularly during these neutral contexts, could help develop strategies to support more adaptive emotional and cognitive processing and make everyday experiences easier to navigate and less exhausting.
So, next time you watch a movie, spare a thought for the incredible work your brain is doing behind the scenes - and how, for some, even a light-hearted animation can be a mental marathon.