Affective valence of words, explicit and implicit memory in clinical depression (original) (raw)
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This study was designed to evaluate the effect of semantic priming with a lexical decision task in 22 depressed patients (DSM-III-R, 1987) and 30 control subjects. These patients were evaluated twice: first when they arrived at the hospital, and secondly, after clinical improvement. Clinical improvement was evaluated using standard depression rating scales. A lexical decision task involving semantic relations (related vs. unrelated, e.g., apple-pear) was used to evaluate the processing of semantic information. The results showed that, for the first evaluation, the depressives presented similar semantic priming to control subjects. When we compared semantic priming in the first and the second passes, we observed that its amplitude was identical. The sole difference between the two passes concerns the global reaction time in the depressive group. This last result suggested that, with clinical improvement, the characteristic psychomotor retardation declines. One of the major results concerns the fact that severe depressive patients (first pass) exhibit normal semantic priming in a lexical decision task. These results indicate, in this clinical population, the preservation of controlled processes implicated in this lexical decision task. © 2002 Éditions scientifiques et médicales Elsevier SAS controlled processing / depression / psychomotor retardation / semantic priming Descriptions of cognitive abnormalities in depression have been published in recent years (for review see ). These cognitive deficits affect attention, memory and executive functions and have been observed in depressed patients when the tasks involve controlled processes but not in tasks dependent on automatic processing . The distinction between automatic and controlled processing is heuristic and is made in order to explain cognitive deficits in depression. Results obtained in the memory field show that depressed patients are impaired in explicit tasks (e.g., free recall), but not in implicit tasks such as word-stem completion . These tasks differ in terms of the processes involved (conscious vs. automatic) and the instructions given to the subject in the test phase. In the implicit task, subjects are asked to produce the first word that comes to mind without reference to the study phase. In contrast, in the explicit tasks they are asked to retrieve the previously seen words. In general terms, the suggestion is that implicit tasks primarily involve automatic processes (in the test phase, activation in memory of the words seen in the study phase) whereas explicit memory tasks necessitate elaborated and controlled processing. The dissociation observed in depressed patients confronted with implicit and explicit tasks suggests that there is a disturbance in controlled pro *Correspondence and reprints: Service du Pr. Chevalier,
Sadder and less accurate? False memory for negative material in depression
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2009
Previous research has demonstrated that induced sad mood is associated with increased accuracy of recall in certain memory tasks; the effects of clinical depression, however, are likely to be quite different. The authors used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm to examine the impact of clinical depression on erroneous recall of neutral and/or emotional stimuli. Specifically, they presented Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists that were highly associated with negative, neutral, or positive lures and compared participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder and nondepressed control participants on the accuracy of their recall of presented material and their false recall of never-presented lures. Compared with control participants, major depressive disorder participants recalled fewer words that had been previously presented but were more likely to falsely recall negative lures; there were no differences between major depressive disorder and control participants in false recall of positive or neutral lures. These findings indicate that depression is associated with false memories of negative material.
Depression and the processing of emotional stimuli: A study of semantic priming
Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1991
This study used a semantic priming paradigm to test spreading activation network models of the effects of depression on attention and memory. Semantic priming and recognition memory for positive, neutral, and negative words were tested in depressed and matched control subjects. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between primes and target strings was manipulated to distinguish between automatic and controlled routes for the spread of activation. In unprimed lexical decision, depressives were slower to respond to neutral than to emotional words at the short SOA, suggesting tonic activation of emotional concepts in these subjects. However, depressives also showed enhanced automatic priming to neutral words, and reduced priming to emotional words, suggesting that depressives may be impaired in the automatic association of emotional concepts. On recognition memory, depressives committed most false positive responses to negative words, whereas controls committed most false positives to positive words, a finding interpreted in telwls of elaboration strategies. Implications of the data for current network models of depression are discussed.
Cognition & Emotion, 2011
Depressed persons have better memory for affectively negative than positive stimuli, a pattern generally not exhibited by non-depressed individuals. The mechanisms underlying this differential memory are not clear. In this study we examined memory for valenced and neutral stimuli in depressed and non-depressed individuals under conditions of relatively unconstrained encoding. We developed a novel task based on the game, Concentration, in which participants tried to match pairs of positive and negative words, and pairs of neutral words, hidden under squares in as few turns as possible. Whereas non-depressed participants selected and turned over positive squares more frequently than they did negative squares, depressed participants selected and turned over positive and negative squares equally often. Depressed participants also matched fewer positive word pairs within the first five minutes of the task than did non-depressed participants, and they exhibited poorer learning of positive words. Depressed and non-depressed participants did not differ in their matching of neutral words. These findings add to a growing literature indicating that depression is characterised by difficulties in the processing of positive stimuli.
Explicit and Implicit Memory in Depressive Patients. Review of the Literature
Psychology, 2013
The cognitive approach to depressive disorders has generally focused on memory problems. In recent years, research conducted in this field has been based on new cognitive theories of memory that distinguish between implicit memory, i.e. an unconscious memory that promotes the use of automatic processes, and explicit memory, i.e. a conscious memory based on the use of controlled processes. Here, we propose a review of the literature concerning the studies of depressive pathology. The initial results suggested a specific impairment of the explicit memory and thus brought depressive pathology into the realm of the pathologies of consciousness. More recent results and/or a consideration of divergent findings have led researchers to revise this interpretation. After looking at the various studies, we shall point out certain divergent results that will allow us to propose some new explanations and, finally, some new avenues of research based on the consideration of clinical and methodological elements. This approach is based on a cognitive and clinical examination of depressive disease. We examine the role of the processes-data-or conceptually driven processes, the role of the paradigm used, and clinical profile with a special interest for the presence of anxious or psychotic symptoms, and for the emotional profile.
Memory for novel positive information in major depressive disorder
Cognition & Emotion, 2014
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with biases in memory, including poor memory for positive stimuli. It is unclear, however, if this impaired memory for positive stimuli in MDD is related to difficulties in the initial processing of stimuli, or alternatively, reflects a decreased ability to draw on memories of positive stimuli after they have been formed. Using two versions of a word-matching task that featured a mixture of novel and practiced emotionally valenced words, we found that depressed individuals experienced greater difficulty learning positively valenced information than did their nondepressed peers. This difficulty seemed to be specific to initial encounters with the novel, but not the practiced, positive stimuli. These findings suggest that memory deficits for positive information associated with depression are related to how this information is initially processed. Implications of these findings for interventions are discussed and directions for future research are advanced.
Selective memory and memory deficits in depressed inpatients
Depression and Anxiety, 2003
We investigated memory impairment and mood-congruent memory bias in depression, using an explicit memory test and an implicit one. Thirty-six severely depressed inpatients that fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for major depressive disorder and 36 healthy controls matched for sex, age, and educational level participated in the study. Explicit memory was assessed with a free recall task and implicit memory with an anagram solution task. Results showed that depressed and controls differed in explicit memory performance, depending on the amount of cognitive distraction between incidental learning and testing. Implicit memory was not affected. In addition, severely depressed patients showed a mood-congruent memory bias in implicit memory but not in explicit memory. The complex pattern of results is discussed with regard to relevant theories of depression.
Masked semantic priming of emotional information in subclinical depression
2001
assume that depressed individuals have an automatic processing bias for negative information (e.g., activation of negative material in memory). In contrast, proposed that depression is associated with a negative bias in controlled, rather than automatic, memory processes. Two experiments investigated whether there is an emotion-congruent bias in automatic (implicit) memory in subclinical depression. The first used a primed lexical decision task with briefly presented, masked primes (prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA, of 56 msec), including both repetition priming and semantic priming conditions. A depression-congruent priming bias was demonstrated in the semantic condition only. The second experiment examined the time course of the depression-congruent semantic priming bias using 56-and 2000-msec SOAs, and confirmed its occurrence in the 56-msec SOA condition. Results of both experiments are interpreted as consistent with a depression-congruent bias in automatic memory processes. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.
A meta-analytic review of mood-congruent implicit memory in depressed mood
• This study evaluates theories related to implicit mood-congruent memory in depression. • Self-relevant encoding enhanced implicit memory in clinical depression. • Matched encoding and recall tasks facilitated implicit mood-congruent recall. • Depth of processing did not impact the relationship between mood and implicit memory. • Age and depression measure scores moderated implicit memory effect sizes. a b s t r a c t In studies of explicit memory, researchers have reliably demonstrated that mood-congruent, depressive information is especially likely to be recalled by individuals exhibiting depressed mood. Results from studies of implicit mood-congruent memory in depressed mood, however, have been largely discrepant. The current research reviews 20 studies of implicit mood-congruent memory for emotionally valenced words in the context of dysphoria and clinical depression. Meta-analytic techniques were used to summarize this research. Results indicated that depres-sive groups exhibited preferential implicit recall of negative information and nondepressed groups exhibited preferential implicit recall of positive information. Also, depressive implicit mood-congruent memory for negative information was associated with recall and encoding tasks that matched with regard to the perceptual versus conceptual processes required. Furthermore, self-relevance emerged as an important moderator for implicit recall in analyses that compared clinically depressed groups to nondepressed groups. These results provide partial support both for the transfer appropriate processing framework of memory and cognitive theories of depression that emphasize self-relevant information. Finally, certain participant characteristics, particularly age and severity of depres-sive symptoms, emerged as important moderators of the effect of group status on depressive implicit recall biases. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
This study examined the association between depression and autobiographical memory deficits. Specifically, it evaluated the impact of depression, complexity of a distraction task, self- or other-referential set and positive or negative cue-word valence on the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories. A sample of 24 depressed women and 24 matched controls completed the Autobiographical Memory Task (AMT) before and after either a high- or low-complexity distraction task. Compared with the control group, the depressed group retrieved fewer specific first memories and had longer retrieval latencies for these. In the self- referential condition this pattern was more pronounced than in the other-referential condition. This suggests that depression is associated with a particular vulnerability in recalling specific self-referential memories. Distraction task complexity and cue-word valence did not affect AMT performance.