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������Ƶ scientist Roselinde Kaiser and research colleagues seek to understand the connection between executive functioning and mood problems

You’ve just missed your test. Thoughts about how you missed it keep circling around in your head and won’t stop. These thoughts begin to disrupt your everyday life by changing the way you approach tasks. You can’t shake the blame you’re putting on yourself for missing this test, and now your mood has dropped.

This pattern is just one of the pathways that��Roselinde Kaiser, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and research colleagues Quynh Nguyen and Hannah Snyder at Brandeis University tested in��.

In this study, led by graduate student Nguyen, researchers aimed to understand the pathway between executive functioning (EF) and mood problems, and found that poor EF creates risk for developing depression and mood problems. EF is an umbrella term that refers to an individual’s ability to pursue goals and adapt to change. The discovery that this pathway is what links EF and mood problems is significant because it creates a foundation for researchers and mental health professionals to develop interventions that can help treat people.

������Ƶ scientist Roselinde Kaiser and her research colleagues aim to understand the pathway between executive functioning and mood problems.

Nguyen, Kaiser and Snyder’s data show that problems in EF can contribute to mood problems through a chain reaction: problems in EF predict dependent stress, which predicts repetitive negative thinking (RNT) and then lower mood. Dependent stressors are stressors that are generated by, at least partially, an individual’s behaviors. The stress that stems from these dependent stressors leads to RNT, which functions like a “washing machine, where the same negative self-oriented thoughts circle in your mind over and over again,” Kaiser says.

Kaiser, who is the director of the ������Ƶ��Center for Healthy Mind and Mood, and who leads the Research on Affective Disorders and Development (RADD) Lab, first became interested in psychology when she was an adolescent and had questions about human suffering. Her research centers around finding ways to support people during periods of suffering, boost individuals’ resilience, foster their recovery or even stop their suffering.

Kaiser, who received a combined PhD in clinical psychology and neuroscience from ������Ƶ in 2013, is drawn to clinical psychology as “a corner of psychology that seems to be poised for the highest impact for the most people,” she says. Through her research she seeks to understand the mechanisms that cause mood problems and that could be potential targets for clinical prevention, especially among younger populations.

“My jam is working with adolescents and young adults, in part because it is this really potent period of risk, and it's also a period in which if we do deliver effective interventions, we can have a lifelong impact.”

Executive functioning and mood problems

Kaiser and her Brandeis colleagues began their recently published research from the previously established connection between EF and mood problems. “We know that EF is associated with mood problems,” Kaiser notes. “We see that within a number of different studies within our research group. How does that happen for individual people?”

EF is an essential part of being able to complete tasks. “College students are a really interesting sub-population because they are navigating a lot of stressors on their own, for the first time. The demands on EF are especially high for college students because they transitioned from—usually—living with adults and caregivers who help them with things like getting them to school on time, homework, laundry, getting their car checked out at the mechanic, grocery shopping, all of the kinds of things that we need to do on the daily, and that we need EF to do all of those things.”

Balancing higher-level academics and more extensive everyday tasks can become even more challenging if EF becomes negatively impacted. “If you look at the age of onset distribution,” she says, “what you’ll see is that more than 50% of the people who experience depression in their lifetime will say it started before the age of 23.”

The researchers’ study took place over a six-week period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through online surveys every two weeks, their participant pool of 154 Brandeis University undergraduate students logged their answers to questions that focused on the pathways the researchers were looking at. Participants’ ages ranged between 18-23, a span intentionally chosen because Kaiser and her colleagues were interested in understanding neurocognitive mechanisms of risk that are targets for intervention.

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“We know that EF is associated with mood problems. We see that within a number of different studies within our research group. How does that happen for individual people?” says ������Ƶ researcher Roselinde Kaiser.

Their research aimed to determine which, if either, of the pathways they designed based on the previously determined connection between EF and mood would provide a structure of how EF leads to mood problems.

In the first pathway, the scientists predicted that executive dysfunction has an indirect effect, or a mediation path, on depression. The concept is that executive dysfunction causes stress generation, which in turn causes RNT. That results in an individual's mood sinking, leading to depression. Kaiser and her colleagues hypothesized that poorer EF would prospectively predict higher RNT levels, and RNT in turn would predict higher depression levels.

In the second model, Kaiser and her colleagues substituted a dependent stressor for perceived uncontrollability of stressors. Perceived uncontrollability means that an individual believes that they lack the ability to change a stressful situation. This pathway looked at proving that if someone struggles with EF, then they have trouble keeping their actions and thoughts directed toward goals. This then causes an individual to feel that they have less control over stressors, in turn causing RNT and their mood to sink. For model two, the researchers hypothesized that poorer EF would predict lower perceived control over stress, and higher levels of RNT would subsequently predict higher depression levels.

“One of the reasons we’re interested in breaking down these pathways is it gives us better insight and more ideas into how we can help people by delivering effective clinical interventions, preventions or preventative programs,” Kaiser explains. “It’s hard to change executive functionability, but we can help buffer people against the dependent stressors by giving them skills and tools so that those types of stressors are less likely to happen.

“From where I sit as a clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, that’s a good reason that we want to understand who is at risk, and how that risk happens.”

Kaiser and her colleagues found through the data they collected that the first pathway was supported but the second was not. There were a number of factors that could have resulted in the second pathway not being supported.

“One totally reasonable explanation is that we were just wrong—that it is not a pathway that is consistently observed among people with EF,” she says. Another possible explanation could be “that the era in which we were measuring these variables—during the COVID pandemic—everyone kind of had heightened uncontrollability in their world. What that might mean is that because everyone was generally feeling like the world was out of control, we weren’t��able to pick up on just the people who are more likely to perceive stress as uncontrollable even in the absence of a global pandemic"

She adds that a third reason could be “the timing is just different if you perceive control or not. Maybe … uncontrollable perceptions happen on a slower time scale (their research was measured every two weeks) meaning that it may take longer for perceived uncontrollability to build up and then push your mood around. Or the opposite, it could happen more quickly. (Overall), we don’t know if any of those things could be true, and it certainly merits more exploration.”

Getting mood snapshots

Neuroimaging, neurocognitive testing (computer testing, psychophysical testing, interviewing and self-reporting are all methods that can be used to collect information from participants. However, since Kaiser, Nguyen and Snyder completed their project, there have been wide strides in the development of new data-collection methods. Kaiser and her research groups are now implementing these new methods alongside others to further their research.

“Each of these modalities has pros and cons in terms of what they can tell us about the underlying constructs that we’re interested in measuring,” Kaiser says. “EF, for example, we can measure that through a neurological assessment or a computer-based assessment. I can also tap into that by asking people about their abilities out in the world; but there are key differences in what we’re getting at.”

These different kinds of assessments are that they give complementing information, but do not duplicate what researchers receive from the surveys. “More recent research from my research group and also my collaborators and colleagues indicates that we’re getting two complementary sources of evidence, but it’s not the same evidence. So, the kind of information from computer-based testing or from the brain is not necessarily the same information we get when we ask people.” These two sources of evidence are only weakly related. Since Kaiser and her colleagues completed the project, they have developed a way to collect information without having participants fill out surveys.

“What we’ve been working with are mobile applications that perform something called digital phenotyping, which effectively means using the information your phone is already collecting about you to understand your actions out in the real world and to get little snapshots on your mood and your stress level in daily life,” Kaiser says, adding, “They can see things like numbers of calls, screen time and other factors that allow them to better understand the individuals.”

Now, researching alongside various experts and students on a number of different projects, Kaiser says she hopes to “make these interventions accessible to everyone at the touch of a finger on their smartphone in the real world. We want people to be able to access this information when they need it.” ��

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