Affective Working Memory in Depression

Depressed individuals show a wide range of difficulties in executive functioning (including working memory), which can be a significant burden on everyday mental processes. Theoretical models of depression have proposed these difficulties to be especially pronounced in affective contexts. However, e...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Emotion (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 23; no. 6; pp. 1802 - 1807
Main Authors:	Songco, Annabel, Patel, Shivam D., Dawes, Katy, Rodrigues, Evangeline, O'Leary, Cliodhna, Hitchcock, Caitlin, Dalgleish, Tim, Schweizer, Susanne
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States American Psychological Association 01-09-2023
Subjects:	Brief Reports Depression (Emotion) Executive Function Female Human Imagery Life Span Major Depression Male Short Term Memory emotion depression working memory capacity complex span imagery
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	Depressed individuals show a wide range of difficulties in executive functioning (including working memory), which can be a significant burden on everyday mental processes. Theoretical models of depression have proposed these difficulties to be especially pronounced in affective contexts. However, evidence investigating affective working memory (WM) capacity in depressed individuals has shown mixed results. The preregistered study used a complex span task, which has been shown to be sensitive to difficulties with WM capacity in affective relative to neutral contexts in other clinical groups, to explore affective WM capacity in clinical depression. Affective WM capacity was compared between individuals with current depression (n = 24), individuals in remission from depression (n = 25), and healthy controls (n = 30). The results showed that, overall, WM capacity was more impaired in the context of negative distractor images, relative to neutral images. Furthermore, those with a lifetime history of depression (individuals with current depression and individuals remitted from depression), performed worse on the task, compared to healthy controls. However, there was no support for the greater disruption of WM capacity in affective compared to neutral contexts in those with a lifetime history of depression. These findings' implications for current models of depression are discussed.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	1528-3542 1931-1516
DOI:	10.1037/emo0001130