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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Neuroimaging
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1583482
First person state/psychological imagery modulates the orbital frontal gyrus and the putamen in individuals with depression
Provisionally accepted
Barbara Tomasino 1*
Maria Chiara Piani 2
Eleonora Maggioni 3
Carolina Bonivento 1
Serena D ' Agostini 4 Matteo Balestrieri 4
Paolo Brambilla 5- 1 Eugenio Medea (IRCCS), Bosisio Parini, Italy
- 2 Translational Research Center, University Psychiatric Services, University of Bern, Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- 3 Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Polytechnic University of Milan, Milan, Lombardy, Italy
- 4 asu fc, Udine, Italy
- 5 Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, Milano, Lombardy, Italy
Patients with depression appear to imagine scenes preferentially from a 3rd person perspective as if they were observers. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging we asked patients with major depressive disorder (19, MDD) and healthy controls (19, HC) to imagine 1st person perspective state/psychological (vs. action) scenes. We found that the left superior frontal gyrus (orbital part) and the right putamen were differentially activated by the state/psychological (vs. action) imagery (vs. letter detection) in MDD individuals vs. HC.We suggest that imagery for state/psychological events increased activation in areas involved in selfrelated processing and personal perspective changes.
Keywords: State/psychological stimuli, emotion, imagery, Depression, fMRI
Received: 25 Feb 2025; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tomasino, Piani, Maggioni, Bonivento, Agostini, Balestrieri and Brambilla. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Barbara Tomasino, Eugenio Medea (IRCCS), Bosisio Parini, Italy
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