Figure 1.

Regional brain activation during active regulation (task 1). Healthy controls and MDD patients showed significantly reduced bilateral amygdala activation during regulation of negative emotion (p < 0.05 family-wise error corrected for ROI). The amount of downregulation in MDD patients depended on symptom severity: the higher the scores in the HAMD scale, the less the downregulation effect in the right amygdala (r = 0.7, p = 0.016, two-tailed). Bar plots indicate size of the effect at the maximum activated voxel in the amygdala for the contrast negative no regulation > negative regulation. Note: plots were depicted only for the right amygdala, the same pattern was observed for the left amygdala. NoREG, No regulation condition; REG, Regulation condition.