No Association Between Amygdala Responses to Negative Faces and Depressive Symptoms: Cross-Sectional Data from 28,638 Individuals in the UK Biobank Cohort

Abstract

In this Priority Data Letter, we report on the largest study to date to test the association between amygdala reactivity and depressive symptoms based on UK Biobank data. For transparency, we initially set out to investigate the association between sleep disruption and depression, focusing on amygdala reactivity as a key candidate mechanism linking the two associated variables (the details of our pre-registered study can be found at https://osf.io/xcv39). When completing our pre-defined analyses, we found no association between the proposed mediator (amygdala reactivity) and our key outcome (depressive symptoms). We judge this unexpected finding to be sufficiently important for the field to merit a standalone report.