Movie that started the Minion craze being used in a scientific study to help researchers understand more about depression
Young people are being hooked up to complicated machines and being made to watch clips of the dastardly Minions while their brain waves are tracked. No, it’s it’s not another evil plot by animated supervillain Gru and his fiendish yellow sidekicks, but rather a new study into depression among adolescents.
Scientists are using clips from the 2010 animated film Despicable Me – the first to feature Gru and the omnipresent Minions – in new research tracking the brain activity of depressed teens. Scientists at King’s College London scanned the brains of young people with and without depression whilst they watched a ten-minute clip of the movie.
The findings suggested that, while many depressed adolescents experience a sense of “emotional numbing or blunting”, their brains may actually be working harder to interpret information about how others are feeling, thinking and responding to situations. This “over-working” of the brain seems to happen more at times when there are fewer cues about how a movie character is feeling or thinking.
Out of the 84 people aged between 16 and 21 in the study, 42 had been clinically diagnosed with depression while 42 were used as non-depressed control subjects. Participants watched a ten-minute clip of Despicable Me while undergoing an MRI scan – the clip alternated between a highly emotional scene, and an emotionally neutral one.
There were distinct differences in the way the brains of the two groups processed the clip, the research found. The depressed group over-used the Dorsal Attention Network – which is thought to voluntarily allocate attention to external stimuli. It also under-recruited the Ventral Attention Network, known for automatically responding to unexpected cues in the environment, such as loud noises or sudden changes in facial expressions.
Dr Marie-Stephanie Cahart, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and the study’s first author, told The Mirror: “Many depressed adolescents report feeling emotionally numb and disconnected, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain unclear. Traditional depression studies typically rely on static images to explore emotion processing, but real-life emotions unfold over time, evolving over several seconds or minutes.”
Cahart added the study was the first to track real-time brain activity in depressed adolescents during movie watching, revealing how they respond to changing emotional contexts. “By using Despicable Me, we show that depression affects how the brain shifts between neutral and emotional scenes, not just how it reacts to emotionally intense events.
“This challenges traditional views of depression, suggesting that we need to look beyond responses to extreme emotions and pay more attention to the difficulties depressed adolescents face in ordinary, neutral moments.” The way of processing information requiring more effort, even when the emotional content is less intense, may contribute to feelings of exhaustion and emotional blunting, researchers explained.