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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Functional features of the mirror neuron system during action observation and execution in patients with anxiety and depressive symptoms

Ekaterina D. Karimova1,2* ,  Sabir E. Burkitbayev1,2 ,  Mikhail S. Zinchuk2 ,  Alla B. Guekht2,3
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1 Laboratory of Applied Physiology of Human Higher Nervous Activity, Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology (IHNA & NPh)n Academy of Sciences (RAS), Moscow, Russia
2 Scientific and Practical Center for Psychoneurology of the Moscow City Health Department, Moscow, Russia
3 Department of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Medical Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, Moscow, Russia
Advanced Neurology 2024, 3(1), 2009 https://doi.org/10.36922/an.2009
Submitted: 11 October 2023 | Accepted: 3 January 2024 | Published: 19 March 2024
© 2024 by the Author (s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

The perception and comprehension of non-verbal information and body language in humans and higher primates are realized by the mirror neuron system (MNS). Anxiety and depressive symptoms may change social perception, which could manifest as functional changes in the MNS. In this paper, using the inverse electroencephalography (EEG) problem and rhythm suppression, we investigated spatial and frequency distortions of the MNS in 24 patients exhibiting depressive and anxiety symptoms and 23 controls. EEG was recorded during four motor tasks: action observation (where participants observed a hand gesture performed by a demonstrator), imagination, execution, and joint execution (simultaneous execution with the demonstrator). Mu suppression was employed across a wide frequency and spatial range to assess the level of MNS activity, while the sLORETA method was employed to localize the activity sources. The results indicate that the patients demonstrated task-selective mu suppression mainly during observation and joint execution in the frontal, central, and occipital areas of the cortex across a wide frequency range. In contrast, the controls demonstrated clear and pronounced mu rhythm suppression in the central regions of the brain in the upper-frequency range (10.5 – 13 Hz) during all mirroring tasks. These results suggest that patients with anxiety and depressive symptoms engage additional neural resources to complete social tasks, particularly involving auxiliary neural networks located in the frontal associative arrays and visual cortex.

Keywords
Anxiety
Depression
Mirror neurons
Electroencephalography
Social perception
Communication
Funding
This article was fully prepared in accordance with the state assignment of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation for 2019 – 2021 (No. 1201371233).
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Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interests.
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