Memory for novel positive information in major depressive disorder (original) (raw)
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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.
Impaired selection of relevant positive information in depression
Depression and Anxiety, 2009
Background: A hallmark characteristic of depression is the inability to regulate the effect of emotional material on cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that depressed individuals are less able than are nondepressed persons to expel irrelevant negative information from working memory (WM), thereby exacerbating the effects of negative content on cognition. The primary goal of this study was to examine whether depressed individuals are also impaired at selecting relevant positive content in the context of representations competing for resources in WM; such an impairment would limit depressed persons' ability to use positive material to ameliorate the cognitive effects of negative information. Methods: We administered a Recency-probes task with neutral, positive, and negative words to 20 currently depressed and 22 never-depressed participants. This task assesses the selection of relevant content in WM by inducing interference between current and prior representations of a stimulus in WM. Reaction times to interference and noninterference trials were compared across valence and group to assess how effectively depressed individuals select taskrelevant emotional content to resolve interference. Results: Compared to neverdepressed controls, depressed individuals were impaired in selecting task-relevant positive stimuli; the performance of the two groups was comparable for selecting task-relevant neutral and negative stimuli. Conclusions: Findings indicate that a valence-specific deficit in WM may contribute to the inability of depressed individuals to regulate emotion, and provide empirical support for formulations that implicate positive insensitivity in the maintenance of depression. Depression and Anxiety 26: 403-410, 2009.
Training forgetting of negative material in depression
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2009
In this study, the authors investigated whether training participants to use cognitive strategies can aid forgetting in depression. Participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) and neverdepressed participants learned to associate neutral cue words with a positive or negative target word and were then instructed not to think about the negative targets when shown their cues. The authors compared 3 different conditions: an unaided condition, a positive-substitute condition, and a negative-substitute condition. In the substitute conditions, participants were instructed to use new targets to keep from thinking about the original targets. After the training phase, participants were instructed to recall all targets when presented with the cues. MDD participants, in contrast with control participants, did not exhibit forgetting of negative words in the unaided condition. In both the negative and positive substitute conditions, however, MDD participants showed successful forgetting of negative words and a clear practice effect. In contrast, negative substitute words did not aid forgetting by the control participants. These findings suggest that training depressed individuals to use cognitive strategies can increase forgetting of negative words.
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.
Affective valence of words, explicit and implicit memory in clinical depression
Journal of Affective Disorders, 1995
Explicit and implicit memory for affectively valenced words (positive, negative or neutral) were investigated in 30 patients suffering from a major depressive episode (DSM-III-R criteria) and 30 normal control subjects. Explicit memory was assessed with a free-recall and a recognition task and implicit memory with a word-stem completion task. Depressed and control subjects recalled more emotional, i.e., positive and negative, words than neutral ones. They recognized less negative than neutral words. In contrast, to recall and recognition performance, word-completion performance was not sensitive to the affective valence of words: depressed and control subjects exhibited equivalent priming of positive, negative and neutral words. These results indicate that, in depressed and normal subjects, the affective valence of words influences memory when conscious, intentional recollection is required but is devoid of effect when such a recollection is not required.
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2014
Background and objectives: Cognitive models propose that depression is caused by dysfunctional schemas that endure beyond the depressive episode, representing vulnerability factors for recurrence. However, research testing negative cognitions linked to dysfunctional schemas in formerly depressed individuals is still scarce. Furthermore, negative cognitions are presumed to be linked to biases in recalling negative self-referent information in formerly depressed individuals, but no studies have directly tested this association. In the present study, we evaluated differences between formerly and never-depressed individuals in several experimental indices of negative cognitions and their associations with the recall of emotional self-referent material. Methods: Formerly (n ¼ 30) and never depressed individuals (n ¼ 40) completed measures of explicit (i.e., scrambled sentence test) and automatic (i.e., lexical decision task) processing to evaluate negative cognitions. Furthermore participants completed a self-referent incidental recall task to evaluate memory biases. Results: Formerly compared to never depressed individuals showed greater negative cognitions at both explicit and automatic levels of processing. Results also showed greater recall of negative self-referent information in formerly compared to never-depressed individuals. Finally, individual differences in negative cognitions at both explicit and automatic levels of processing predicted greater recall of negative self-referent material in formerly depressed individuals. Limitations: Analyses of the relationship between explicit and automatic processing indices and memory biases were correlational and the majority of participants in both groups were women. Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence of negative cognitions in formerly depressed individuals at both automatic and explicit levels of processing that may confer a cognitive vulnerability to depression.
Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 2015
Previous research has demonstrated that depressed individuals have difficulty both disengaging from negative information and maintaining positive information in working memory (WM). The present study was conducted to examine whether the tendency for depressed individuals to maintain negative content in WM and to experience difficulties maintaining positive content in WM is due to negative mood (in)congruency effects during a depressive episode, or whether these tendencies are evident outside of a depressive episode. Individuals who had recovered from a depressive episode and never disordered controls performed emotion 0-back and 2-back tasks designed to assess biases in updating emotional content in working memory. Similar to currently depressed individuals in previous studies, recovered depressed participants disengaged from happy stimuli more quickly and from sad stimuli more slowly than did their never-depressed counterparts. Despite the extension of a depression-specific finding...
The influence of emotional target cues on prospective memory performance in depression
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2011
This study investigated the impact of emotional valence on event-based prospective memory performance in depression. Thirty individuals with depression and 29 healthy adults performed a prospective memory task in which the emotional valence of the prospective targets was manipulated (positive, neutral, negative). Collapsed across all valence conditions, healthy adults outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. This effect was qualified by planned contrasts indicating that the two groups only differed when responding to positively valenced cues, reflecting a positivity effect in healthy adults. These data are in line with previous research, which shows that healthy participants better remember positively valenced cues, but are the first to show an absence of this effect in those with depression.
Remembering the Good, Forgetting the Bad: Intentional Forgetting of Emotional Material in Depression
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2005
The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases.
Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression
Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2010
Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, resp...