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Attentional bias in dysphoria: The role of inhibitory processes
Cognition and Emotion
Abstract
This study investigates inhibitory dysfunctions in the processing of emotional material and their relation to depressive symptomatology and vulnerability. In a series of three experiments, a negative priming task with positive and negative distractor and target words was presented. The negative priming task makes it possible to assess the degree of inhibition of activated but nongoal‐relevant stimulus representations. Results indicate that participants with elevated depression scores fail to show negative priming in affective evaluation and self‐reference tasks. Moreover, participants reporting a history of major depressive episodes fail to show negative priming when asked to respond to the valence or self‐descriptiveness of emotional stimuli. The obtained results are in line with the hypothesis that depression is associated with an inhibitory deficit for negative information. Implications of these results for research on selective attention in depression are discussed.
... We used the Negative Affective Priming (NAP) Task (Joormann, 2004(Joormann, , 2006 to measure the performance of the inhibition on irrelevant negative stimuli. An NAP Task involves two Valence conditions, namely Positive and Negative. ...
... In contrast, the Control condition lacks this readjustment process because the valence of the prime's distractor and the probe's target is dissimilar. Consequently, a negative NAP Effect (shorter reaction times for probe trials in the NAP condition) or zero effect (no difference in reaction times between NAP and Control conditions) indicates poor inhibitory performance, indicating that inhibition has not effectively operated in the NAP conditions where a readjustment process would be unnecessary (Frings et al., 2015;Joormann, 2004). ...
... The performance of IC on negative information for each participant was measured using the score of the NAP effect by subtracting the average RTs for Control conditions with RTs for NAP conditions (Joormann, 2004) ...
This study aims to examine whether psychological distress mediates the association between rumination and symptoms of depression-anxiety, and whether such a mediating role is moderated by the ability to inhibit irrelevant negative information (a moderated-mediation model). On-line questionnaires comprising the Ruminative Response Scale (RRS), Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21), and Negative Affective Priming (NAP) Task as a measure of inhibitory control (IC) on negative information were administered to 181 participants (M = 21.57 years old, 80.1% females). The results of the analyses showed (1) a significant negative association between psychological distress and the performance of inhibitory control on negative information, (2) a partial mediating role of psychological distress in the relationship between rumination and symptoms of depression and anxiety, and (3) that the mediating role was moderated by inhibitory control performance. The stronger the inhibitory control, the weaker a relationship between rumination and psychological distress, which is associated with the reduction in the mediating role of psychological distress on the symptoms of depression and anxiety. The implications of our findings will be discussed by considering the systemic dynamic Model for understanding depression and anxiety.
... Such readjustment is assumed to be absent in the control condition, due to the valence dissimilarity of the prime's distractor and probe's target. Hence, a bad inhibition performance would be indicated by an NAP effect that has a negative value (shorter reaction times for probe trials in the NAP condition) or zero (no difference in the reaction times for probe trials in the NAP and control conditions), because the inhibition has failed to operate in the NAP condition so that a readjustment process would be unnecessary (Joormann, 2004;Frings et al., 2015). ...
... Another study by Pe et al. (2013) found that working memory updating ability modulates the relationship between CR and affect. Given that the effectiveness of the working memory updating process should be preceded by the later stage of selective attention to inhibit irrelevant information (Joormann, 2004), we argue that a study of the moderating effect of inhibitory control on the relationship between CR and affect balance is highly relevant. Furthermore, previous studies have suggested an inhibitory mechanism in emotion regulation (i.e., cognitive reappraisal) by using non-emotional cognitive tasks, such as the flanker task (Cohen et al., 2015;Toh & Yang, 2022) and the Stroop task . ...
... Inhibitory control. The NAP task, a variant negative priming task that employs affective stimuli (Joormann, 2004), was used to measure inhibitory control of irrelevant emotional information. The task was programmed using OpenSesame 3.3.10 ...
This study tested the role of inhibitory control as a moderator in the relation-ship between cognitive reappraisal and affect balance. We employed moderation ana-lyses with data collected from 201 participants (mean age = 22.07 years, 76.1%female). We measured their affect balance in the last 4 weeks (with the Scale of Posi-tive and Negative Experience [SPANE]), their habitual use of cognitive reappraisal(ERQ Scale), and their performance in inhibiting irrelevant positive and negative informa-tion by means of an online negative affective priming task. Results indicated that cogni-tive reappraisal was a significant and positive predictor for affect balance. As predicted,inhibition of irrelevant positive and negative stimuli significantly moderated the relation-ship between cognitive reappraisal and affect balance. Specifically, moderate to weakinhibition of irrelevant positive stimuli and moderate to strong inhibition of irrelevantnegative stimuli were found to strengthen this relationship. Thus, our findings suggestthat individuals can strengthen the positive impact of cognitive reappraisal on affect bal-ance by strongly inhibiting irrelevant negative stimuli while allowing irrelevant positivestimuli to be processed in the working memory
... negative semantic-priming [41]), but also for affective targets presented after an affectively congruent distractor (i.e. negative affective-priming) [42,43]. In the NAP task, participants are presented with a prime and a probe display in succession. ...
... If the prime-distractor is effectively ignored, then responses to a subsequent probetarget of the same valence is delayed, resulting in a larger NAP effect. Thus, the size of the NAP effect is generally thought to measure the individual's ability to inhibit irrelevant emotional material of a particular valence from entering working memory [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. By examining the NAP effect for positive material under conditions favouring the positivity offset, the contribution of inhibitory processes to the positivity offset can be determined. ...
... Two experiments were conducted to test these hypotheses. In experiment 1, a modified version of the NAP task designed to fully dissociate priming effects for positive and negative words was directly compared to the original version of the NAP task [43]. In experiment 2, participants completed the modified version of the task while electroencephalography (EEG) activity was recorded. ...
Some research suggests that positive and negative valence stimuli may be processed differently. For example, negative material may capture and hold attention more readily than equally arousing positive material. This is called the negativity bias, and it has been observed as both behavioural and electroencephalographic (EEG) effects. Consequently, it has been attributed to both automatic and elaborative processes. However, at the lowest levels of arousal, faster reaction times and stronger EEG responses to positive material have been observed. This is called the positivity offset, and the underlying cognitive mechanism is less understood. To study the role of selective attention in the positivity offset, participants completed a negative affective priming (NAP) task modified to dissociate priming for positive and negative words. The task required participants to indicate the valence of a target word, while simultaneously ignoring a distractor. In experiment 1, a behavioural facilitation effect (faster response time) was observed for positive words, in stark contrast to the original NAP task. These results were congruent with a previously reported general categorization advantage for positive material. In experiment 2, participants performed the task while EEG was recorded. In additional to replicating the behavioural results from experiment 1, positive words elicited a larger Late Positive Potential (LPP) component on ignored repetition relative to control trials. Surprisingly, negative words elicited a larger LPP than positive words on control trials. These results suggest that the positivity offset may reflect a greater sensitivity to priming effects due to a more flexible attentional set.
... Two common cognitive features of depression and anxiety are rumination and worry (Beck, 1979;Beck et al., 2005), that is, an excessive focus on and repetitive thinking about past or future negative events. One possible explanation for rumination and worry is an impairment in the inhibition of irrelevant negative information (Hertel, 1997;Joormann, 2004;Wyer & Robert, 2013). The negative affective priming task is used to measure the ability to ignore irrelevant emotional (in this case negatively valenced) stimuli (Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann, 2004). ...
... One possible explanation for rumination and worry is an impairment in the inhibition of irrelevant negative information (Hertel, 1997;Joormann, 2004;Wyer & Robert, 2013). The negative affective priming task is used to measure the ability to ignore irrelevant emotional (in this case negatively valenced) stimuli (Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann, 2004). Participants are first instructed to ignore a distractor stimulus and then to indicate the emotional valence of a target stimulus. ...
Cognitive biases are thought to contribute to depression/anxiety. In addition to self‐reported measures, cognitive tasks could potentially be integrated with clinical practice as more precise measures of cognitive biases. In a large online study we explored the individual‐level association between depression/anxiety symptoms and performance on (1) reward bias, (2) negative affective priming, and (3) change blindness tasks. Participants completed tasks alongside depression/anxiety symptom questionnaires. We used regression analyses to test for associations between task performance and questionnaire scores. We conducted a replication study of the change blindness task, and performed a mega‐analysis of the two studies. Faster reaction time in the change blindness task was associated with higher depression score (B = −27, p = 0.034) in the first study (N = 545) and higher depression and anxiety scores (depression: B = −15, p = 0.045; anxiety: B = −17, p = 0.022) in the replication study (N = 616). These effects were significant in the mega‐analysis but did not withstand adjusting for age in either the original and replication studies or the mega‐analysis. We found no association between depression/anxiety and reward bias (N = 504) and negative affective priming (N = 539). Our results provide preliminary evidence that individuals with more severe depressive/anxious symptoms may be faster at identifying changes in the change blindness task. Contrary to previous findings, neither reward bias nor negative affective priming was associated with depression/anxiety.
... Several papers report on attempts to improve working memory or cognitive control. The ability to exercise cognitive control over internal as well as external information is key in order to avoid interference by negative memories (Joormann, 2004). Based on previous work showing that depression is characterized by cognitive control impairments (e.g., Joormann, 2004) and theoretical arguments to remediate such neurocognitive impairments (Siegle et al., 2007), a wealth of studies are examining whether training cognitive control (Cognitive control training; CCT) can improve key symptoms of depression or prevent depressive episodes in at-risk population (for a review, see Koster et al., 2017). ...
... The ability to exercise cognitive control over internal as well as external information is key in order to avoid interference by negative memories (Joormann, 2004). Based on previous work showing that depression is characterized by cognitive control impairments (e.g., Joormann, 2004) and theoretical arguments to remediate such neurocognitive impairments (Siegle et al., 2007), a wealth of studies are examining whether training cognitive control (Cognitive control training; CCT) can improve key symptoms of depression or prevent depressive episodes in at-risk population (for a review, see Koster et al., 2017). In the literature a number of different tasks are being used to train cognitive control, with the dual n-back task (see Jaeggi et al., 2008), the adapted paced auditory serial addition task (aPASAT; Siegle et al., 2014) and variations on flanker tasks (Cohen et al., 2015) being among the most promising ones. ...
Basic research on emotional memory has given rise to important innovations in research on memory training in the context of psychopathology. In the special issue om memory training research is presented on (1) memory processes in psychopathology; (2) modification of emotional memories in psychotherapy; and (3) procedures to directly target memory processes. We review the key contributions of the special issue in these areas and describe the challenges for further research in this area. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
... Within depressed groups, including those of high trait dysphoria, rumination, and clinical depression, emotional interactions with attention appear to more generally encompass attentional biases to negative information than the relatively threat-specific idiosyncrasies of anxiety. Individuals with high depressive symptoms show difficulty ignoring and rejecting negative information (e.g., De Raedt and Joormann, 2004), which has been proposed to explain why such individuals typically experience depressive symptoms due to a simple difficulty in rejecting such thoughts and behaviors (Joormann, 2004). As with anxiety, however, impaired ability to ignore distraction also occurs for non-emotional material across clinically depressed and atrisk groups (e.g., Beckwe et al., 2014;Owens et al., 2012). ...
... Within depressed groups, including those of high trait dysphoria, rumination, and clinical depression, emotional interactions with attention appear to more generally encompass attentional biases to negative information than the relatively threat-specific idiosyncrasies of anxiety. Individuals with high depressive symptoms show difficulty ignoring and rejecting negative information (e.g., De Raedt and Joormann, 2004), which has been proposed to explain why such individuals typically experience depressive symptoms due to a simple difficulty in rejecting such thoughts and behaviors (Joormann, 2004). As with anxiety, however, impaired ability to ignore distraction also occurs for non-emotional material across clinically depressed and atrisk groups (e.g., Beckwe et al., 2014;Owens et al., 2012). ...
Due to their ability to capture attention, emotional stimuli tend to benefit from enhanced perceptual processing, which can be helpful when such stimuli are task-relevant but hindering when they are task-irrelevant. Altered emotion-attention interactions have been associated with symptoms of affective disturbances, and emerging research focuses on improving emotion-attention interactions to prevent or treat affective disorders. In line with the Human Affectome Project’s emphasis on linguistic components, we also analyzed the language used to describe attention-related aspects of emotion, and highlighted terms related to domains such as conscious awareness, motivational effects of attention, social attention, and emotion regulation. These terms were discussed within a broader review of available evidence regarding the neural correlates of (1) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Perception, (2) Emotion-Attention Interactions in Learning and Memory, (3) Individual Differences in Emotion-Attention Interactions, and (4) Training and Interventions to Optimize Emotion-Attention Interactions. This comprehensive approach enabled an integrative overview of the current knowledge regarding the mechanisms of emotion-attention interactions at multiple levels of analysis, and identification of emerging directions for future investigations.
... A meta-analysis showed that people with depression, compared to non-depressed people, exhibited an attentional bias favoring negative information and an absence of positive bias (Peckham et al., 2010). In addition, they have also been found to show difficulties in the inhibition of negative information (Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann, 2004) and in reward processing (Kelley et al., 2019). Another study that examined attentional bias by use of the Stroop task found a relationship between self-stigma in mental health and biased processing of stigma-related material and emphasized the role of information-processing bias in self-stigma (Chan & Mak, 2015). ...
Self-stigma is a common phenomenon among people with schizophrenia and is related to negative outcomes such as psychological distress as well as poor emotion regulation (ER). However, few studies have examined possible moderators or mediators in the association between ER and self-stigma. In the present study, we examined two competing models regarding the role of depression as a moderator or mediator in the relationship between ER as an independent variable and self-stigma as a dependent variable among individuals with schizophrenia. Fifty-four adults diagnosed with schizophrenia took part in the study. Participants filled out questionnaires about self-stigma, depression, and ER, and data was analyzed cross-sectional. Results showed positive associations between self-stigma, deficits in ER, and depression. An examination of moderation and mediation models of depression did not show support for the moderation role of depression but rather for its mediating role between ER and self-stigma. Namely, difficulties in ER were associated with greater depression, which, in turn, was associated with higher levels of self-stigma. Our study expands the understanding regarding the association between impaired ER as it might relate to the formation of self-stigma and highlights the importance of depression as a mediator between them. It also stresses the need to improve ER abilities as a possible means to reduce negative effects such as depression and self-stigma among people with schizophrenia.
... These findings may align with Quigley et al. (2020) suggestion that individuals with depression have cognitive control deficits over negatively valenced stimuli but not over neutral or positive stimuli. Other studies support cognitive control impairments over negative stimuli among depressed individuals by various paradigms (Epp et al., 2012;Joormann, 2004;Zetsche et al., 2012). Thus, as the stimuli were neutral in the present study, it is possible that depressed individuals demonstrated no impairment in exerting cognitive control over neutral stimuli. ...
Background
Depression is associated with impairments in cognitive control. Considering the lack of mechanistic models accounting for cognitive control deficits in depression, the expected value of control (EVC) theory offers a mechanistic view for allocating cognitive control emphasizing motivational components (efficacy, value). Efficacy refers to the possibility that an effort leads to a special outcome and reward refers to the value (amount) associated with the outcome. This study aimed to examine the role of the EVC in depression.
Method
This study used a within-between-subject design. Participants with depression (n = 36) and healthy controls (n = 31) completed a clinical diagnostic interview, the Beck Depression Inventory-II, the General Health Questionnaire-12, and a computer-based incentivized Stroop Color-Word Paradigm in which levels of efficacy (high vs. low) and the amount of rewards (high vs. low) were presented as cues before target stimuli.
Results
We found significant interaction effects of group × efficacy and efficacy × reward in terms of reaction time in the Stroop Paradigm. Follow-up analyses indicated the Depressed group were significantly slower than Controls on high efficacy trials, but the two groups did not differ significantly on low efficacy trials. Additionally, on high efficacy trials, reward did not influence performance, but on low efficacy trials, high reward improved performance in both groups.
... However, these approaches have the limitation of putting patients at a risk of recurrence as they do not address attentional bias (Joormann and Gotlib, 2007;Spinhoven et al., 2018). Even after negative thoughts are modified, attentional bias remains stable and intensifies negative emotional reactivity; therefore, attentional bias should be modified to prevent the recurrence of depression (Linville, 1996;Joormann, 2004;Gotlib and Joormann, 2010). ...
This study aims to verify the effectiveness of attentional bias modification (ABM) in reducing attentional bias related to depression, particularly in the later stages of attention as a pattern of difficulty in disengagement from depression-relevant stimuli, and to assess its effects on emotional reactivity to stress. A total of 78 participants were separated into four groups based on their levels of depression (minimal and mild) and the types of ABM. The positive ABM (pABM) trained participants to disengage their attention from depression-relevant stimuli and directed their attention toward more positive stimuli, whereas the neutral ABM (nABM) was designed to have no effect. The participants underwent a free-viewing task by eye tracker both before and after ABM to observe changes in attentional bias. Subsequently, they reported their emotional response after a stress-inducing task. The group of mildly depressed participants receiving pABM showed significantly less attention to depression-relevant negative affective stimuli and reported significantly decreased negative emotional reactivity to stress compared to the other groups. pABM had an effect on decreasing difficulty in disengaging from depression-relevant negative affective words (DW). However, it did not increase the dwell time on positive affective words (PW) in the current study. This might be due to the short duration of the application of ABM. The current study conducted ABM twice in 1 day, and this might not be enough to increase the dwell time on PA. This study verified that the ABM effectively decreased the attentional bias of depression and its relevant symptom, emotional reactivity to stress.
... Another potentially relevant factor was the cognitive load requirement (i.e., remembering a six-digit number while doing the task). Prior studies have found that MDD is associated with difficulties in suppressing negative stimuli from entering working memory [44][45][46]. It is possible, then, that with the rapid mood improvement with ketamine, working memory capacity may have improved, leading to enhanced response inhibition for the negative stimuli. ...
Ketamine has recently emerged as a highly effective new treatment for people with treatment-resistant depression with rapid antidepressant effects. However, these effects are often short lasting, and the potential cognitive mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects, such as effects on emotional processing bias, remain poorly understood. In the present study, we explored potential changes in emotional and cognitive processing following a single treatment of subcutaneous ketamine in a randomised double-blind controlled study with an active control. Participants with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) were recruited from a single site from the Ketamine for Adult Depression Study (KADS Trial) and were randomly assigned to receive racemic ketamine hydrochloride (n=10) or midazolam hydrochloride (n=11) in a 1 : 1 ratio. A healthy control sample (n=23) was recruited to attend a single experimental session without any treatment. All MDD participants completed mood ratings and cognitive assessments prior to and one day after a single randomised treatment. The results showed no significant differences in performance changes after treatment across the majority of emotion-related (i.e., Emotional Stroop Task, Affective Go/No-Go Task) and cognitive (Ruff 2 and 7 Selective Attention Test, Controlled Word Association Test) outcome measures. Participants who received ketamine showed a significant improvement in a negative processing bias test (i.e., The Scrambled Sentence Task; Cohen’s d=.67, p=.016), which was not significantly associated with improvement in psychological symptoms (r=−.662, p=.074). The results from this exploratory study suggest that a single ketamine treatment may modulate negative affective bias. Limitations to this study included the small sample size and lack of follow-up. Future larger trials are required to confirm this finding.
... De Lissnyder et al. (2012) found that individuals with higher ruminative tendencies exhibit shifting impairments in working memory from negative stimuli when exposed to exogenous negative stimuli, indicating heightened cognitive vulnerability to depression. Findings from the existing study add further evidence that rumination may be one of the key underlying mechanisms in information-processing biases, such as difficulty in disengaging from negatively salient stimuli (Joormann, 2010) and appear to be automatic rather than strategic process. Current findings could suggest that clinical intervention both in prevention and specifically targeting levels of rumination may strengthen treatment for at risk-youth (Gibb et al., 2012) as the targeting of ruminations in treatment of adults is already taking place (Watkins et al., 2009). ...
Rumination, which can be studied through its associated attentional biases, and is a part of the RDoC Negative Valence Systems constructs of Loss, has been proposed as a key transdiagnostic feature in depression. The current study uses eye tracking measurements to explore how different levels of brooding and reflection rumination interact with attentional biases in a non-clinical sample of high and low ruminators. Methodology: 123 adults were administered questionnaires of rumination, depression and participated in passive viewing task in which they watched sets of angry, happy, sad and neutral faces, while their eye movements were tracked. Findings indicate greater sustained attention toward sad and angry faces and away from happy faces among non-clinical individuals with high levels of brooding rumination, even when controlling for depression scores. The study adds further evidence that brooding rumination and attentional biases to negative stimuli are associated with one another. Behavioral parameters such as attention bias to help us to distinguish high ruminators among non-clinical sample.
... When individuals are caught in a stressful state of epidemic information overload, they repeatedly focus on their negative state of mind, resulting in a negative interpretation of the present situation with a subsequent increase in helplessness and anxiety. Joormann (2004) also argued that high information intake leads to too much irrelevant information entering the working memory, reducing the individual's extraction of positive information, and amplifying the negative aspects of difficult events and emotional experiences. Thus, individuals with information overload may be more inclined to engage in repeated negative thoughts about distress and situations. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a generally high level of state anxiety resulting from the high contagiousness of the disease and strict prevention and control policies. The present study mainly focused on the relationship between the individual intolerance of uncertainty and state anxiety in the regular epidemic prevention and control phase in China, and aimed to investigate the mediating role of information overload and rumination, as well as the moderating role of self-compassion. A total of 992 Chinese residents from 31 provinces participated in this study, and completed questionnaires regarding intolerance of uncertainty, information overload, self-compassion, rumination, and state anxiety. Descriptive statistics and correlation analyses, as well as tests for mediating effects and moderated chain mediating effects, were performed on the data using SPSS 26.0 and Process 3.5 macro program. The findings indicated that intolerance of uncertainty significantly predicted individual state anxiety. Information overload mediates the effects of intolerance of uncertainty and state anxiety. Rumination also mediates the effect of uncertainty intolerance on state anxiety. Information overload and rumination have a chain mediation effect on the link between intolerance of uncertainty and state anxiety. Self-compassion mediates the effect of information overload on rumination. The results illuminate theoretical and practical implications in the regular epidemic prevention and control phases and reveal the protective role of self-compassion.
... This may be linked to depression being characterized by deficits in the successful inhibition of mood-congruent material (Joormann and Stanton, 2016). In behavioral studies, depression is related to impairments in the capacity of individuals to inhibit negative stimuli (Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann, 2004). The reduction in angry N2 following CBT may reflect an alteration of the neural resources required to inhibit negative stimuli; indeed, relative to controls, there is evidence that patients with depression exhibit increased activity in the ACC when inhibiting negative stimuli (Eugène et al., 2010). ...
Background
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an efficacious treatment for depression. CBT may in part exert its therapeutic effect by strengthening inhibitory control (IC). However, the relationship between CBT and IC has yet to be thoroughly explored; in particular, it is not clear whether IC is modulated following a course of CBT.
Methods
Forty-one adults with depression were recruited to undergo sixteen weeks of CBT; data from twenty-five healthy controls were used for baseline comparisons. Participants completed an affective Go/No-go task, a measure of IC, while undergoing electroencephalography recording. Electroencephalography measures of interest were the event-related potential (ERP) N2 and P3 components.
Results
At baseline, individuals with depression exhibited greater ERP amplitudes during the N2 regardless of affective condition; source reconstruction attributed this to patients exhibiting greater activity in the superior frontal gyrus, right temporal lobe, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Following treatment, the ERP amplitude during the N2 component decreased for angry stimuli but increased for happy stimuli. Source reconstruction attributed ERP changes in the angry-condition to the left occipital and fusiform gyrus, and changes in the happy-condition to regions including the superior frontal gyrus and ACC.
Limitations
There was no placebo-treatment group.
Conclusions
Neural correlates of the affective Go/No-go task were altered in depression and were found to be selectively modulated over the course of CBT in a condition- and region-specific manner. These findings support the notion that the modulation of IC may be one of the potential therapeutic mechanisms of CBT in the treatment of depression.
... If deficits in cognitive control represent an underlying risk factor for depression, we would also expect these deficits to persist following recovery from a major depressive episode, particularly among those who experience recurrent episodes. Some studies have found that cognitive control deficits persist following recovery from a depressive episode (Demeyer et al., 2012;Joormann, 2004;Levens & Gotlib, 2015;Paelecke-Habermann et al., 2005;Vanderhasselt & De Raedt, 2009). Other studies find evidence of deficits in cognitive control among participants who are currently depressed but not for those whose symptoms have remitted (Gotlib & Cane, 1987;Hedlund & Rude, 1995;Merens et al., 2008;Quigley et al., 2020). ...
Working memory capacity is an important psychological construct, and many real-world phenomena are strongly associated with individual differences in working memory functioning. Although working memory and attention are intertwined, several studies have recently shown that individual differences in the general ability to control attention is more strongly predictive of human behavior than working memory capacity. In this review, we argue that researchers would therefore generally be better suited to studying the role of attention control rather than memory-based abilities in explaining real-world behavior and performance in humans. The review begins with a discussion of relevant literature on the nature and measurement of both working memory capacity and attention control, including recent developments in the study of individual differences of attention control. We then selectively review existing literature on the role of both working memory and attention in various applied settings and explain, in each case, why a switch in emphasis to attention control is warranted. Topics covered include psychological testing, cognitive training, education, sports, police decision-making, human factors, and disorders within clinical psychology. The review concludes with general recommendations and best practices for researchers interested in conducting studies of individual differences in attention control.
... Such a pattern of performance could be explained by the cognitivebehavioral model that the WE with high anxiety/depression have distorted or dysfunctional schemas that can distort information processing and thus were more likely to have biased working memory to sad and angry faces. A lot of studies demonstrated that depressed individuals exhibited deficits in removing/inhibiting negative stimuli (e.g., negative words) from working memory (Joormann, 2004;Joormann and Gotlib, 2008;Yoon et al., 2014) and had difficulties in disengaging sad faces from working memory (Levens and Gotlib, 2010;Foland-Ross et al., 2013), resulting in higher accuracy in working memory for negative pictures (Linden et al., 2011;Li et al., 2018). A functional MRI (fMRI) study with the n-back task showed greater activations elicited by negative emotional stimuli in left DLPFC among patients with depression (Kerestes et al., 2012). ...
Background
The negative impacts of spousal bereavement on the emotional health of the elderly (e.g., depression and anxiety) have been revealed. However, whether widowhood impairs emotional cognition among the elderly is less known. The purpose of this study is to reveal the emotional cognitive deficits among the widowed elderly.
Methods
In this study, we recruited 44 widowed elderly (WE) and 44 elder couples (non-widowed elderly, NWE) and examined their emotional cognition including attention and visual working memory, which were measured by the visual search task and delayed-match-to-sample task, respectively. Three kinds of emotional faces (i.e., sad, angry, and happy) were adopted as the attentional or mnemonic targets.
Results
It revealed that WE had a general deficit in search efficiency across emotional types, while they showed mnemonic deficits in negative faces but not positive faces. Furthermore, the modeling analysis revealed that the level of depression or state anxiety of the elderly moderated the effects of widowhood on the deficits of mnemonic processing, i.e., the deficits were only evident among WE with the high level of depression or state anxiety.
Conclusion
These findings reveal the attentional deficits in sad, angry, and happy faces and the mnemonic deficits in sad and angry faces among elderly who suffer from widowhood and point out the important role of emotional problems such as depression and state anxiety in modulating these emotional cognitive deficits.
... Whenever classical conditioning is observed (e.g., a dog starts salivating to a tone after that tone has been paired with food), they conclude that association formation has taken place. Likewise, researchers have used negative priming effects (i.e., the observation that responses to a stimulus are slowed down when the stimulus is preceded by a related stimulus) as a proxy for the mental process of the inhibition of mental representations (e.g., Joormann, 2004;Tipper, 1985). ...
We construct two infinite-dimensional irreducible representations for D(2, 1; alpha): a Schrodinger model and a Fock model. Further, we also introduce an intertwining isomorphism. These representations are similar to the minimal representations constructed for the orthosymplectic Lie supergroup and for Hermitian Lie groups of tube type. The intertwining isomorphism is the analogue of the Segal-Bargmann transform for the orthosymplectic Lie supergroup and for Hermitian Lie groups of tube type.
... If deficits in cognitive control represent an underlying risk factor for depression, we would also expect these deficits to persist following recovery from a major depressive episode, particularly among those who experience recurrent episodes. Some studies have found that cognitive control deficits persist following recovery from a depressive episode (Demeyer et al., 2012;Joormann, 2004;Levens & Gotlib, 2015;Paelecke-Habermann et al., 2005;Vanderhasselt & De Raedt, 2009). Other studies find evidence of deficits in cognitive control among participants who are currently depressed but not for those whose symptoms have remitted (Gotlib & Cane, 1987;Hedlund & Rude, 1995;Merens et al., 2008;Quigley et al., 2020). ...
Working memory capacity is an important psychological construct and many real-world phenomena are strongly associated with individual differences in working memory functioning. Although working memory and attention are intertwined, several studies have recently shown that individual differences in the general ability to control attention is more strongly predictive of human behavior than working memory capacity. In this review, we argue that researchers would therefore generally be better suited to studying the role of attention control rather than memory-based abilities in explaining real-world behavior and performance in humans. The review begins with a discussion of relevant literature on the nature and measurement of both working memory capacity and attention control, including recent developments in the study of individual differences of attention control. We then selectively review existing literature on the role of both working memory and attention in various applied settings and explain, in each case, why a switch in emphasis to attention control is warranted. Topics covered include psychological testing, cognitive training, education, sports, police decision making, human factors, and disorders within clinical psychology. The review concludes with general recommendations and best practices for researchers interested in conducting studies of individual differences in attention control.
... Affective content does have a greater impact at the neural level and in patients with affective disorders. Similarly, a number of studies on inhibition have implemented an inhibition task which makes use of either neutral or affective stimuli Joormann, 2004). However, some studies (e.g., did implement both the 1 The popularity of these tasks were determined by computing the number of times these tasks appeared in papers listed on PubMed between 2009 and 2019. ...
Executive functions (EF) are a set of higher order cognitive processes that are engaged in a goal directed behaviour. It has been suggested that these functions work differently depending on the type of stimuli (non-affective or affective). Although there are many studies where EF measures have been used for affective or non-affective stimuli, the obtained results do not provide the opportunity to directly compare the data from both measures. To address the problem, the present study
aimed at presenting a new battery of cognitive tasks working with non-affective and affective stimuli. Thus, the n-back, Stroop and letter-number tasks were used to assess three core EF, namely updating, inhibition and shifting. New affective versions of the classical n-back, Stroop and letter-number tasks were created as well. Eighty-four participants completed a neutral version followed by the affective version of each task. The results showed a significant positive correlation between the neutral and affective versions in updating and shifting, but not inhibition. There were no significant differences in performance on the neutral and affective versions of updating, cost of inhibition and shift cost. More experiments should be conducted to further broaden the applicability of this novel approach in the assessment of EF in emotion-cognition interactions.
... It has been demonstrated that the attentional bias of negative emotions is largely associated with difficulties inhibition in depression. [21,22]. The widely distributed networks of frontoparietal cortex and subcortical systems are crucial to emotion regulation and cognitive inhibition on functional communications in brain [23]. ...
Patients with depression have shown attention bias and inhibition deficits of negative emotional valance. However, it is not clear how the distributed brain networks support the function of inhibition and whether the modulation altered in depression. Thirty-seven patients with depression and 37 matched controls were undertook the audio-visual emotion task-fMRI and whole-brain psychophysiological interaction analysis was employed to obtain three different types of connectivity features, including task-modulated connectivity (TMC), task-independent connectivity (TMC) and task-functional connectivity (TFC). Support vector machine method was used to classify depression and explore the relation of reaction time prediction. Results indicated decreased modulation related to frontoparietal cortex, increased in temporal lobe and sensorimotor system in depression. Moreover, TMC performed better in predicting RT, while TIC and TFC had better classification performance. This study reveals that aberrant modulation of neural response is widely associated with the inhibitory dysfunction in depression and support that different connectivity features provide supplementary information for underpinning the functional integration and its alterations of brain networks.
... The present study sought to further elucidate the relationship between rumination and PTSD symptoms by examining the moderating effects of shifting and focusing attentional control in trauma-exposed veterans. It has been proposed that rumination reflects "sticky attention" that maintains negative emotions by marshaling attentional processes towards and preventing disengagement from negative information (Joormann, 2004). In the context of rumination, deficits in attentional control may facilitate an "inward focus" that perpetuates symptoms of PTSD (see Koster et al., 2011). ...
Although rumination is a risk factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the processes that influence the association between rumination and PTSD symptoms are unclear. Processes that facilitate reorienting or redirecting attention may play an important role in the relationship between rumination and PTSD. While attentional control is one such cognitive process, it consists of both shifting and focusing components, and it remains unclear which component most strongly influences the association between rumination and PTSD. This study examined attentional control as a moderator of the relationship between rumination and PTSD symptoms and cognitions among combat-exposed veterans (N = 114). Results revealed that attentional shifting but not focusing moderated the effect of rumination on PTSD symptoms, such that those high in rumination and low in attentional shifting reported increased avoidance and posttraumatic cognitions. Etiological and clinical implications are discussed.
... This cognitive response style leads depressed patients to experience more spontaneous negative memories, to focus more on problems than their solutions, and to appraise situations as hopeless (Lyubomirsky et al., 1998;Watkins et al., 2001). Further, rumination is a relatively stable trait and is associated with deficits in attentional control, especially processes involving inhibition (Joormann, 2004). ...
Background: rumination has been reported as a cognitive vulnerability factor in adolescent and adult depression. The present brief review aimed at summarizing the results of the genetic studies that investigate the candidate genes for rumination in children and adolescents.
Methods: bibliographic research was conducted on PubMed and Science Direct from their inception to February 2020. The search terms used were: ‘rumination, ruminative thinking, repetitive thinking and ‘gene, gen*’.
Results: eight studies were identified. Results suggest that variations in the 5-HTTLPR and BDNF genes may contribute to the tendency to ruminate, modelling the relationship between life stress and rumination.
Limitations: the interpretation of these results is limited by the sample sizes of the selected studies, the study designs, and the heterogeneity of the instruments assessing rumination.
Conclusions: these findings partially support the notion that variation in in the 5-HTTLPR and BDNF genes is associated with biological sensitivity to rumination.
... The effective use of cognitive inhibition is likely an important component in the regulation of sadness. For example, individuals with a history of depression as well as clinically depressed individuals display difficulties inhibiting irrelevant sad stimuli (Joormann, 2004;Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann and Gotlib, 2010). Thus, the improvement in inhibitory control of personally relevant sad faces may represent an adaptive response to regulate emotions associated with partner distress. ...
Despite evidence of differential processing of personally relevant stimuli (PR), most studies investigating attentional biases in processing emotional content use generic stimuli. We sought to examine differences in the processing of PR, relative to generic, stimuli across information processing tasks and to validate their use in predicting concurrent interpersonal functioning. Fifty participants (25 female) viewed generic and PR (i.e., their intimate partner’s face) emotional stimuli during tasks assessing selective attention (using a modified version of the Spatial Cueing Task) and inhibition (using the Negative Affective Priming task) of emotional content. Ratings of relationship quality were also collected. Evidence of increased selective attention during controlled and greater avoidance during automatic stages of processing emerged when viewing PR, relative to generic, emotional faces. We also found greater inhibition of PR sad faces. Finally, male, but not female, participants who displayed greater difficulty disengaging from the sad face of their partner reported more conflict in their relationships. Taken together, findings from information processing studies using generic emotional stimuli may not be representative of how we process PR stimuli in naturalistic settings.
... symptoms on the interpretation bias finding has to be interpreted with caution, because (1) it did not reliably influence the outcome nor did it convincingly not show any influence and (2) the reliability for this questionnaire in the present sample was low. However, because interpretation biases are hypothesized to be more associated with depressive symptoms and later stages of cognitive processing, the trending effects appear consistent with the literature [51]. ...
The number of adolescent refugees around the world has been continuously increasing over the past few years trying to escape war and terror, among other things. Such experience not only increases the risk for mental health problems including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but also may have implications for socio-cognitive development. This study tested cognitive-affective processing in refugee adolescents who had escaped armed conflict in Syria and now resided in Istanbul, Turkey. Adolescents were split into a high trauma (n = 31, 12 girls, mean age = 11.70 years, SD = 1.15 years) and low trauma (n = 27, 14 girls, mean age = 11.07 years, SD = 1.39 years) symptom group using median split, and performed a working memory task with emotional distraction to assess cognitive control and a surprise faces task to assess emotional interpretation bias. The results indicated that high (vs. low) trauma symptom youth were ~ 20% worse correctly remembering the spatial location of a cue, although both groups performed at very low levels. However, this finding was not modulated by emotion. In addition, although all youths also had a ~ 20% bias toward interpreting ambiguous (surprise) faces as more negative, the high (vs. low) symptom youth were faster when allocating such a face to the positive (vs. negative) emotion category. The findings suggest the impact of war-related trauma on cognitive-affective processes essential to healthy development.
... Words: Another approach is to use emotional words (e.g., Joormann, 2004, Bradley & Lang, 1997. Words have the advantage, that they are processed very fast. ...
Clinical Depression, affective reactivity, experimental paradigm, psychophysiological parameters of emotional blunting, fMRI
... For instance, depressed patients needed more time than healthy controls to discard negative faces and words from WM [15,16]. Individuals who score high on self-reported measures of depression exhibit impaired attention disengagement from negative information [17], a decreased ability to inhibit the impact of emotional faces [18] and negative words [19]. These findings suggest that the cognitive control deficit in such individuals not only occurs concurrently with depressive symptoms but also is a vulnerability factor of depression. ...
Deficits in cognitive control have been found in depression, but how they contribute to depressive symptoms remains unknown. The present study investigated whether the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control on negative emotion varies with depression level and whether the regulatory efficacy affects depressive symptoms via the mediation of rumination. Fifty participants screened by the Zung Self-Rating Depressive Scale (SDS) with high and low depression levels were selected. They were instructed to controlled-process different semantic representations of aversive pictures, and the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) evoked by the pictures was used as the measure of electrocortical response. We found that controlled-processing neutral representations of aversive pictures significantly decreased the amplitude of LPP relative to that under controlled-processing unpleasant ones in an early window in the low depression group and that this regulatory effect was impaired in the high depression group. Furthermore, a mediation analyses indicated that the regulatory efficacy of controlled-processing different semantic representations was associated with SDS score via the mediation of rumination. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the association between the function of cognitive control in emotion generation and depressive symptoms and indicated a pathway from the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control to depression via rumination.
... With respect to WM, depression is characterized by the biased representation of negative vs. positive material in WM (Joormann, 2010;Koster et al., 2011;Schweizer et al., 2019). This skewed representation of emotional material results from difficulties (Goeleven et al., 2006;Joormann, 2004), difficulties in shifting between negative and neutral mental sets , and difficulties in updating WM by removing no-longer relevant negative information (Levens & Gotlib, 2010). These difficulties in working memory operations may hamper flexible adaptation of cognition and behavior in depression (Grahek, Everaert, Krebs, & Koster, 2018). ...
Depression is theorized to be caused in part by biased cognitive processing of emotional information. Yet, prior research has adopted a reductionist approach that does not characterize how biases in cognitive processes such as attention and memory work together to confer risk for this complex multifactorial disorder. Grounded in affective and cognitive science, we highlight four mechanisms to understand how attention biases, working memory difficulties, and long-term memory biases interact and contribute to depression. We review evidence for each mechanism and highlight time- and context-dependent dynamics. We outline methodological considerations and recommendations for research in this area. We conclude with directions to advance the understanding of depression risk, cognitive training interventions, and transdiagnostic properties of cognitive biases and their interactions.
... We expected children with a secure (B) attachment to be lower in APs than children with avoidant (A), resistant (C), and disorganized (D) attachments. C children's continuous attachment-related worries (Joormann, 2004;Silva et al., 2012) were expected to result in impaired attention, particularly in the presence of attachment-related negative emotions. It was less clear if children with A and C attachments would differ in APs, although the literature reviewed suggests that children with A attachments might have fewer APs than children with C attachments. ...
Attachment theorists have argued that securely attached children tend to exhibit flexible attention; the attention of children with resistant attachments is centered on attachment-related worries; children with avoidant attachments defensively focus attention away from attachment-related emotions/thoughts; and children with disorganized attachments exhibit the collapse of attention and disorientation. In this meta-analysis, a relation between attachment security status and attention problems (APs) in children (18 years and younger) was found. In total, 62 studies (67 samples) met the inclusion criteria. Children with insecure attachments were higher in APs than those with a secure attachment (r = 0.21); those with avoidant or resistant attachments were higher than securely attached children (rs = 0.10 and 0.21, respectively); children with disorganized attachments were higher than those with organized attachments (r = 0.27). Effects were larger when attachment and APs were measured concurrently/closer in time (for secure versus all; disorganized versus organized attachment); for representational versus observational measures of attachment, non-parental reports of APs, and attachment assessed at an older age (for disorganized versus organized attachment); for samples with proportionally fewer boys (secure versus resistant attachment); in recent studies (secure versus avoidant attachment); and when disorganized children were in a high-risk sample or resistant children were in a low-risk condition.
... There is a large body of research which suggests that suppression-induced forgetting effects on the TNT are due to an inhibitory mechanism that disrupts the availability of the unwanted memory, which later renders it inaccessible (Anderson & Hansmayr, 2014;Anderson et al., 2004). With this in mind, it is notable that depression is associated with deficits in inhibitory control (Joormann, Yoon & Zetsche, 2007;Joormann, 2004;Goeleven, De Raedt, Baert, & Baert, 2006). Therefore, it has been suggested that impaired forgetting in depression is likely to be a consequence of poor inhibitory control (Noreen & Ridout, 2016a). ...
Our aim was to determine if deficits in intentional forgetting that are associated with depression and dysphoria (subclinical depression) could be explained, at least in part, by variations in working memory function. Sixty dysphoric and 61 non-dysphoric participants completed a modified version of the think/no-think (TNT) task and a measure of complex working memory (the operation span task). The TNT task involved participants learning a series of emotional cue–target word pairs, before being presented with a subset of the cues and asked to either recall the associated target (think) or to prevent it from coming to mind (no think) by thinking about a substitute target word. Participants were subsequently asked to recall the targets to all cues (regardless of previous recall instructions). As expected, after controlling for anxiety, we found that dysphoric individuals exhibited impaired forgetting relative to the non-dysphoric participants. Also as expected, we found that superior working memory function was associated with more successful forgetting. Critically, in the dysphoric group, we found that working memory mediated the effect of depression on intentional forgetting. That is, depression influenced forgetting indirectly via its effect on working memory. However, under conditions of repeated suppression, there was also a direct effect of depression on forgetting. These findings represent an important development in the understanding of impaired forgetting in depression and also suggest that working memory training might be a viable intervention for improving the ability of depressed individuals to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind.
The widely acknowledged cognitive theory of depression, developed by Aaron Beck, focused on biased information processing that emphasizes the negative aspects of affective and conceptual information. Current attempts to discover the neurological mechanism underlying such cognitive and affective bias have successfully identified various brain regions associated with severally biased functions such as emotion, attention, rumination, and inhibition control. However, the neurobiological mechanisms of how individuals in depression develop this selective processing toward negative is still under question. This paper introduces a neurological framework centered around the frontal-limbic circuit, specifically analyzing and synthesizing the activity and functional connectivity within the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Firstly, a possible explanation of how the positive feedback loop contributes to the persistent hyperactivity of the amygdala in depression at an automatic level is established. Building upon this, two hypotheses are presented: hypothesis 1 revolves around the bidirectional amygdalohippocampal projection facilitating the amplification of negative emotions and memories while concurrently contributing to the impediment of the retrieval of opposing information in the hippocampus attractor network. Hypothesis 2 highlights the involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in the establishment of a negative cognitive framework through the generalization of conceptual and emotional information in conjunction with the amygdala and hippocampus. The primary objective of this study is to improve and complement existing pathological models of depression, pushing the frontiers of current understanding in neuroscience of affective disorders, and eventually contributing to successful recovery from the debilitating affective disorders.
Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with impairments in neuropsychological functioning. A key mechanism in memory retrieval is the process of inhibiting information that is not relevant to the specific memory, termed retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In MDD, attenuated RIF has been observed, in which related memories are not suppressed. The effect is proposed to be mediated by inhibitory functions, and associations with rumination have been observed. Whether the neuropsychological functions of verbal learning capacity and capacity for mindfulness are associated with RIF has not been examined.
Methods: Participants were 65 MDD (mean age 46.4 years) and 65 healthy controls (mean age 42.4 year). Participants completed a RIF task and measures in depressive severity, verbal learning, mindfulness and rumination.
Results: MDD participants demonstrated significant attenuation in RIF in comparison with healthy participants. Verbal learning and mindfulness were positively correlated with RIF, while increased depressive severity and rumination further attenuated RIF in MDD.
Conclusions: Attenuated RIF is evident in MDD which is further attenuated by increasing depressive severity and rumination, while verbal learning ability and capacity for mindfulness were associated with restored RIF. These findings support clinical interventions which promote a state of relaxed self-awareness in MDD.
The negative affective priming (NAP) task is a behavioral measure of inhibition of
emotional stimuli. Previous studies using the NAP task have found that individuals with depression show reduced inhibition of negative stimuli, suggesting that inhibition biases may play a role in the etiology and maintenance of depression. However, the psychometric properties of the NAP task have not been evaluated or reported. In the present study, we report data on the association between NAP task performance and depression symptoms in three independent samples, and we evaluate the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the NAP effect
indices. The NAP effect for both negative and positive target words had poor internal consistency in all three samples, as well as poor 2-week (Study 2) and 6-month (Study 3) test-retest reliability. The internal consistency and test-retest reliability of response times (RT) for the individual trial types were moderate to high, as were the intercorrelations between trial types. This pattern of results indicates that overall RT is reliable but variance in RTs for the different trial types in the NAP task is indistinguishable from variance in overall RT. Depression symptom
severity was not associated with the NAP effect for negative or positive target words in any of the samples, which could be due to the poor reliability of the NAP effect. Based on these findings, we do not recommend that researchers use the NAP task as a measure of individual differences in the inhibition of emotional stimuli.
Cognitive theories of depression posit that maladaptive information processing increases the risk for depression recurrence. There is increasing theoretical and empirical support for the cognitive control of emotional information as a vulnerability factor for depression recurrence. In this investigation, findings from behavioral studies that compared the cognitive control of emotional information between participants with remitted major depressive disorder (rMDD) and healthy control (HC) participants were examined. Response times (RTs) and error rates were used as outcome variables, and aspects of clinical features, sample characteristics, and methodology and design were examined as moderating variables. The final review included 44 articles with a total of 2,081 rMDD participants and 2,285 HC participants. The two groups significantly differed in the difference score between RTs for negative and positive stimuli. Specifically, the difference in RTs between negative and positive stimuli was larger in participants with rMDD than in HC participants, indicating greater difficulty controlling irrelevant negative (vs. positive) stimuli in rMDD. Such cognitive control bias may be associated with preferential processing of negative over positive information in working memory. This imbalance may then be linked to other emotional information processing biases and emotion dysregulation, thereby increasing the risk for depression recurrence. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.
Cognitive approaches to depression have benefitted from recent research on belief updating, examining how new information is used to alter beliefs. This review presents recent advances in understanding various sources of bias in belief updating in depression. Specifically, research has demonstrated that people with depression have difficulty revising negative beliefs in response to novel positive information, whereas belief updating in depression is not related to an enhanced integration of negative information. In terms of mechanisms underlying the deficient processing of positive information, research has shown that people with depression use defensive cognitive strategies to devalue novel positive information. Furthermore, the disregard of novel positive information can be amplified by the presence of state negative affect, and the resulting persistence of negative beliefs in turn perpetuates chronically low mood, contributing to a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop of beliefs and affect. Synthesising previous research, this review proposes a coherent framework of when belief change is likely to occur, and argues that future research also needs to elucidate why people with depression hesitate to abandon negative beliefs. Recent insights from belief updating have not only improved the understanding of the psychopathology of depression, but also have the potential to improve its cognitive-behavioural treatment.
Background:
Inhibitory control (IC) deficits have been proposed as a potential risk factor for depression. However, little is known about the intra-individual daily fluctuations in IC, and its relationship to mood and depressive symptoms. Here, we examined the everyday association between IC and mood, in typical adults with various levels of depressive symptoms.
Methods:
Participants (N = 106) reported their depressive symptoms and completed a Go-NoGo (GNG) task measuring IC at baseline. Then, they completed a 5-day ecological-momentary-assessment (EMA) protocol, in which they reported their current mood and performed a shortened GNG task twice/day using a mobile app. Depressive symptoms were measured again following the EMA. Hierarchical-linear-modeling (HLM) was applied to examine the association between momentary IC and mood, with post-EMA depressive symptoms as a moderator.
Results:
Individuals with elevated depressive symptoms demonstrated worse and more variable IC performance over the EMA. In addition, post-EMA depressive symptoms moderated the association between momentary IC and daily mood, such that reduced IC was associated with more negative mood only for those with lower, but not higher, symptoms.
Limitations:
Future investigations should examine the validity of these outcomes in clinical samples, including patients with Major Depressive Disorder.
Conclusions:
Variable, rather than mere reduced, IC, is related to depressive symptoms. Moreover, the role of IC in modulating mood may differ in non-depressed individuals and individuals with sub-clinical depression. These findings contribute to our understanding of IC and mood in real life and help account for some of the discrepant findings related to cognitive control models of depression.
In this study, Go/No-go task combined with ERP technology were used to explore the characteristics of negative emotion inhibition in SD and healthy individuals and whether there are differences between negative emotion inhibition and neutral emotion inhibition in SD. The results showed that SD showed the same poor negative inhibition as depressive patients in behavior, but there was no significant difference between SD and CG in ERPs. Overall, compared with neutral emotional information, negative emotional information would reduce attention control in conflict processing, lead to faster conflict processing, attract attention, occupy more cognitive resources, and be more difficult to inhibit. It is concluded that the negative attention bias of SD individuals is only reflected in the bottom-up stimulation processing, but has not developed into the top-down cognitive control, which also suggests that the corresponding intervention measures at the early stage of depression may have better effects.
Cognitive theories of depression propose that impaired cognitive control of emotional material may be involved in the onset, maintenance, and/or recurrence of depression. The present study is a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature on cognitive control biases in depression. Seventy-three articles describing 77 independent studies (N = 4,134 participants) were included in the meta-analysis. Depression-vulnerable individuals, including individuals with diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD), remitted MDD (rMDD), and dysphoria, showed significantly impaired cognitive control of negative stimuli relative to both neutral and positive stimuli. Control samples did not exhibit the aforementioned biases, and instead showed significantly worse cognitive control of positive stimuli relative to negative stimuli and similar cognitive control of neutral stimuli relative to both negative and positive stimuli. Evidence for sample or methodological moderators of effect sizes was limited and inconsistent. Based on our review, we recommend that researchers assess and examine directional and causal relationships between multiple cognitive control biases (especially in updating and set shifting), investigate the causal relationships between general deficits and biases in cognitive control, select tasks that control for nontarget influences on performance (e.g., processing speed), use sample sizes adequately powered to detect small effects, provide psychometric information on task indices, consistently report within-groups biases and between-groups comparisons of biases, and examine potential moderators of cognitive control biases at the individual level.
Working memory (WM) deficits are recognized as serious cognitive impairment in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). This review aims to clarify the effects of impaired WM function in patients with MDD and explore non‐invasive and effective treatments that can be adopted in clinical practice. This review: (1) synthesizes extant literature examining brain function and brain areas in terms of WM in individuals with depression; (2) utilizes the outcomes of the studies presented in this review to discuss the effects of impaired WM function on cognitive processing in individuals with depression; (3) integrates the treatments explored in current studies; and (4) provides some suggestions for future research. We found that: (1) central executive (CE) components affect the processing of WM, and this might be one of the factors influencing cognitive biases, as it is implicated in repetitive negative thinking and rumination; (2) the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and the regions of the default mode network (DMN) play a vital role in CE functioning; (3) psychotherapy, cognitive training, exercise and physical therapy can be used as complementary treatments for MDD.
Background and objectives
Rumination involves fixating on negative content, is associated with biases in inhibitory control, and typically worsens negative mood. In contrast, distraction attempts to engage attentional control and downregulate negative mood. To date studies have not dissociated the detrimental effects of rumination from beneficial effects of distraction on individuals’ ability to inhibit irrelevant negative information. Moreover, research has not examined the possible pathways connecting rumination and distraction, negative mood and inhibitory control.
Methods
To bridge these gaps, we report two studies that assess the effect of induced rumination versus distraction on inhibitory control among high ruminators.
Results
In Study 1 distraction improved inhibition of negative content, whereas induced rumination impaired inhibition of negative content. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and demonstrated that the effect of distraction on inhibition of negative content was mediated by changes in negative mood.
Limitations
Our studies are limited by small sample sizes and lack of measurement of possible long-term effects.
Conclusions
Our findings provide preliminary evidence for an effect of mood on inhibition and not vice versa, among high ruminators. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications of these findings.
This research investigates whether thinking about the consequences of a problem being resolved can improve social problem-solving in clinical depression. We also explore whether impaired social problem solving is related to inhibitory control. Thirty-six depressed and 43 non-depressed participants were presented with six social problems and were asked to generate consequences for the problems being resolved or remaining unresolved. Participants were then asked to solve the problems and recall all the consequences initially generated. Participants also completed the Emotional Stroop and Flanker tasks. We found that whilst depressed participants were impaired at social problem-solving after generating unresolved consequences, they were successful at generating solutions for problems for which they previously generated resolved consequences. Depressed participants were also impaired on the Stroop task, providing support for an impaired inhibitory control account of social problem-solving. These findings advance our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning social problem-solving in depression and may contribute to the development of new therapeutic interventions to improve social-problem solving in depression.
Adolescents experiencing anxiety or depression exhibit cognitive biases favoring the processing of negative emotional information. It remains unknown whether common neurobiological processes underlie these biases across anxiety and depression. Here, brain imaging was acquired from typical, anxious, and depressed adolescents during an emotional-interference task. Functional connectivity patterns were assessed while adolescents were cued to attend to or ignore faces. Results revealed a shared dimension of anxious and depressive symptoms was associated with reduced changes in connectivity patterns between conditions in which adolescents needed to ignore or attend to fearful faces. These findings were exclusive to fearful faces and observed only for functional connections with a primary face-representation area (fusiform gyrus). Results suggested a failure to flexibly adapt communication patterns with sensory-representation areas in the presence of negative emotional information, which may reflect a common neurobiological mechanism explaining biases favoring such information shared among adolescent anxiety and depression.
Background
Individuals with mood disorders frequently experience cognitive impairment, which impacts on the long-term trajectory of the disorders, including being associated with persisting difficulties in occupational and psychosocial functioning, residual mood symptoms, and relapse. Current first-line treatments for mood disorders do little to improve cognitive function. Targeting cognition in clinical research is thus considered a priority. This protocol outlines a prospectively-registered randomised controlled trial (RCT) which examines the impact of adding group-based Cognitive Remediation (CR) to Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT-CR) for individuals with mood disorders.
Methods
This is a pragmatic, two-arm, single-blinded RCT comparing IPSRT-CR with IPSRT alone for adults (n = 100) with mood disorders (Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Disorder) with subjective cognitive difficulties, on discharge from Specialist Mental Health Services in Christchurch, New Zealand. Both treatment arms will receive a 12-month course of individual IPSRT (full dose = 24 sessions). At 6 months, randomisation to receive, or not, an 8-week group-based CR programme (Action-based Cognitive Remediation – New Zealand) will occur. The primary outcome will be change in Global Cognition between 6 and 12 months (treatment-end) in IPSRT-CR versus IPSRT alone. Secondary outcomes will be change in cognitive, functional, and mood outcomes at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months from baseline and exploratory outcomes include change in quality of life, medication adherence, rumination, and inflammatory markers between treatment arms. Outcome analyses will use an intention-to-treat approach. Sub-group analyses will assess the impact of baseline features on CR treatment response. Participants’ experiences of their mood disorder, including treatment, will be examined using qualitative analysis.
Discussion
This will be the first RCT to combine group-based CR with an evidence-based psychotherapy for adults with mood disorders. The trial may provide valuable information regarding how we can help promote long-term recovery from mood disorders. Many issues have been considered in developing this protocol, including: recruitment of the spectrum of mood disorders, screening for cognitive impairment, dose and timing of the CR intervention, choice of comparator treatment, and choice of outcome measures.
Trial registration
Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12619001080112. Registered on 6 August 2019.
Although the relationship between emotional working memory (WM) and depressive symptoms has been well established in clinical samples, research in the subclinical population has produced mixed results. The present study tested the effect of WM load on control of interference from emotional (positive, negative, neutral) distractors in dysphoria. Dysphoric (n = 32) and non‐dysphoric (n = 35) university students were administered the emotional 2‐back (lower WM load) and 3‐back (higher WM load) tasks. Results showed that resisting negative distractors was more difficult for the dysphoric group than the non‐dysphoric group, but only in the 3‐back task. The results demonstrate that dysphoria is associated with greater interference from negative distractors under high WM load. We conclude that both WM load and emotional valence have an effect on WM performance in dysphoria, and the poor ability to resist interference from negative distractors in WM might be a key cognitive vulnerability factor for depression.
It has been suggested that a high tendency to ruminate presents a deficient emotion regulation. Past research found that people with high tendency to ruminate show sustained attention for negative stimuli and increased negative thinking, which may result in intensified experiences of negative emotions. Moreover, high level of rumination was associated with low emotional understanding. Accordingly, we hypothesized (1) high ruminators (HR) experience more intense emotional reactions than low ruminators (LR) for negative but not positive emotions, (2) LR have higher emotional clarity than HR, and (3) there would be the same pattern of results for brooding but not for reflective pondering. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, a rumination response style questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory-II. They also rated emotional intensity and identified emotion type for scene pictures from the CAP-D (Categorized Affective Pictures Database). The highest (HR) and lowest (LR) quarters of ruminators were compared on levels of emotional intensity and emotional clarity. We found HR experienced negative emotions more intensely than LR, with no difference for positive emotions. In contrast to our hypothesis, the two groups did not differ in their emotion understanding. This pattern of results was found for brooding but not for reflective pondering. Our research sheds light on the mechanism underlying rumination and emotion regulation.
Literature data did not show univocal evidence in discriminating which form of attachment insecurity is involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): both anxiety and avoidance was related to OCD symptomatology. No study used the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) that allows for investigation of differentiated facets of attachment anxiety and of avoidance. We investigated: (1) whether individuals with OCD differed from controls in the facets of attachment security (anxiety and avoidance), (2) which attachment facets predicted a diagnosis of OCD, controlling for socio-demographics and obsessive beliefs, (3) which attachment facets predicted specific OCD symptoms, controlling for socio-demographics and obsessive beliefs.
Two hundred seventy participants (135 OCD patients and 135 matched controls) completed the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised, Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire-46 and ASQ. OCD patients reported respectively lower and higher levels on confidence and attachment anxiety than controls. Higher need of approval was the most important predictor of OCD diagnosis beyond the other attachment facets, and even of the obsessive beliefs. Using multivariate generalised linear models, the two facets of attachment anxiety, the need for approval (that predicted higher levels of obsessing and ordering symptoms), and preoccupation with relationships (that predicted higher hoarding symptoms) seemed to explain variance over and above OCD-related beliefs and socio-demographics. Discomfort with closeness contributed to the predictions of ordering symptoms.
In conclusion, the interpersonal dynamics related to attachment in OCD patients should be carefully considered during assessment and treatment of OCD patients in clinical practice.
Facilitated processing of negative information might contribute to the etiopathogenesis and maintenance of depressive symptoms. Cardiac vagal tone, indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), is believed to represent a proxy of the functional integrity of the neural networks implicated in brooding rumination, affective interference and depression. The present study examined whether HRV may moderate the relation between brooding rumination, affective interference and depressive symptoms in a sample of healthy individuals (n = 68) with different degrees of depressed mood. Self-report measures of depression and brooding were collected, whereas the emotional Stroop task was employed to measure affective interference. Three-minute resting-state electrocardiogram was recorded to obtain time- and frequency-domain vagally mediated HRV parameters. Stepwise linear regression analyses revealed that HRV was a significant moderator of the positive association between depression and brooding rumination, but not of the association between depression and affective interference. An integrated model is supported, in which vagally mediated HRV appeared to potentiate the positive link between depressive symptoms and brooding rumination. Considering that HRV and brooding rumination were found to have an interacting role in determining the severity of depressive symptoms, they may represent potential clinical targets in the prevention and treatment of depressive symptoms.
Cognitive theories of depression propose that difficulty exerting cognitive control over emotional information may be involved in the development, maintenance, and/or recurrence of depression. This study evaluated depression-related biases in three cognitive control functions, namely inhibition, working memory updating, and set shifting. Currently depressed (n = 53), remitted depressed (n = 55), and non-clinical control (n = 51) participants completed computer-based paradigms designed to measure inhibition, working memory updating, and set shifting, respectively, involving emotional stimuli. As hypothesized, currently depressed participants exhibited biases in cognitive control over emotional information but did not exhibit broad impairments on a non-emotional measure of cognitive control. Specifically, currently depressed participants showed a reduced ability to inhibit the processing of negative distracting stimuli and to update working memory with emotional information, relative to control participants. Currently depressed participants also had greater difficulty shifting away from an emotion-relevant task set than from an emotion-irrelevant task set, whereas control participants did not show this bias. Remitted depressed participants did not demonstrate similar biases to currently depressed participants.
Background: This pilot study explores a therapeutic setting combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for patients with drug-resistant depression. tDCS has shown efficacy for depression treatment and improvement could be maintained with the combination with mindfulness, which has shown depression relapse-prevention properties.
Methods: Thirty-one treatment-resistant depressed patients have been assigned to our experimental treatment condition [tDCS combined with MBCT (n = 15)] or to a control condition [tDCS combined with relaxation (n = 16)]. Patients have completed both an intensive treatment block (eight consecutive days) and a single remind session 2 weeks after the intensive treatment. Clinical (depression, anxiety, and rumination) and cognitive (general cognitive functioning, mental flexibility, and working memory) symptoms of depression have been assessed through different questionnaires at baseline (t0), after the first block of treatment (t1), and after the remind session (t2).
Results: Results seem to indicate a positive impact of both treatment conditions on clinical and cognitive symptoms of depression at t1. However, the treatment condition combining tDCS with mindfulness has been found to better maintain clinical improvements at t2 regarding some clinical [Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and Sadness and Anger Ruminative Inventory (SARI)] and cognitive variables (Digit Span-F and Digit Span-B).
Conclusion: Based on the current observations, a multi-disciplinary treatment approach combining tDCS and MBCT might be effective in resistant depressed patients in the long run, even though further clinical research is necessary.
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The affective congruency effect, wherein shorter response latencies are observed for affectively congruent prime-target pairs in the evaluation task (i.e. the target is evaluated as positive or negative) has often been interpreted in terms of a spread of activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. In the present article, it is argued that the effect might be due to a conflict between the responses that are activated by the prime and target, assuming that the prime serves as a distractor for processing the target. If such a conflict occurs, this would result in a negative priming effect, that is, an affective incongruency of prime (e.g. death) and target (e.g. wise) on trial n-1 (prime-trial) will result in a slowing of the response on trial n (probe-trial) if the probe target (e.g. lonely) is affectively congruent to the distractor of the prime-trial. This hypothesis was confirmed in Experiment 1 (N = 35) with a sequential presentation of distractor and target (i.e. SOA = 300msec) and further corroborated by Experiment 2 (N = 72) with a factorial manipulation of sequential and simultaneous (SOA = 0msec) presentation. These results favour a view that affective congruency effects in the evaluation task are due to response path interference processes which are resolved by an inhibition of the tendency to respond to the distractor.
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This chapter discusses the theoretical and empirical literature that addresses aging and discourse comprehension. A series of five studies guided by a particular working memory viewpoint regarding the formation of inferences during discourse processing is described in the chapter. Compensatory strategies may be used with different degrees of likelihood across the life span largely as a function of efficiency with which inhibitory mechanisms function because these largely determine the facility with which memory can be searched. The consequences for discourse comprehension in particular may be profound because the establishment of a coherent representation of a message hinges on the timely retrieval of information necessary to establish coreference among certain critical ideas. Discourse comprehension is an ideal domain for assessing limited capacity frameworks because most models of discourse processing assume that multiple components, demanding substantially different levels of cognitive resources, are involved. For example, access to a lexical representation from either a visual array or an auditory message is virtually capacity free.
Mildly-to-moderately depressed and nondepressed subjects were randomly assigned to spend 8 minutes focusing their attention on their current feeling states and personal characteristics (rumination condition) or on descriptions of geographic locations and objects (distraction condition). Depressed subjects in the rumination condition became significantly more depressed, whereas depressed subjects in the distraction condition became significantly less depressed. Rumination and distraction did not affect the moods of nondepressed subjects. These results support the hypothesis that ruminative responses to depressed mood exacerbate and prolong depressed mood. whereas distracting response shorten depressed mood.
examines briefly the history of the concept of attention within psychology and neuroscience / various methods used . . . to link cognitive approaches to attention to underlying brain systems are reviewed / 3 anatomical networks that subserve the processes of orienting, higher-level attention, and alertness are discussed / the overview ends with a summary of possible future development and application of this knowledge to attentional pathologies and other attentional states (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments assess adult age differences in the extent of inhibition or negative priming generated in a selective-attention task. Younger adults consistently demonstrated negative priming effects; they were slower to name a letter on a current trial that had served as a distractor on the previous trial relative to one that had not occurred on the previous trial. Whether or not inhibition dissipated when the response-to-stimulus interval was lengthened from 500 msec in Exp 1 to 1,200 msec in Exp 2 depended on whether young Ss were aware of the patterns across trial types. Older adults did not show inhibition at either interval. The age effects are interpreted within L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) framework, which proposes inhibition as a central mechanism determining the contents of working memory and consequently influencing a wide array of cognitive functions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated selective processing of emotional information in anxiety and depression using a modified Stroop color naming task. 19 anxious, 18 depressed, and 18 normal control Ss were required to name the background colors of anxiety-related, depression-related, positive, categorized, and uncategorized neutral words. Half of the words were presented supraliminally, half subliminally. Anxious Ss, compared with depressed and normal Ss, showed relatively slower color naming for both supraliminal and subliminal negative words. The results suggest a preattentive processing bias for negative information in anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization.
College students in dysphoric or nondysphoric moods studied pairs of words and later took a fragment-completion test of memory for targets from the pairs (under process-dissociation procedures for obtaining estimates of controlled and automatic retrieval; L. L. Jacoby, 1996). Between the study and test phases, some participants waited quietly for 7 min; others rated self-focused materials designed to invoke ruminations in the dysphoric group; and still others rated self-irrelevant and task-irrelevant materials. A dysphoria-related impairment in controlled retrieval occurred in the first 2 conditions but not in the 3rd condition. These results show that the nature of task-irrelevant thoughts contributes to memory impairments in dysphoria and suggest that self-focused rumination might also contribute to similar impairments under unconstrained conditions that permit mind wandering.
The symptoms of schizophrenia can be interpreted as the result of a defect in the mechanism that controls and limits the contents of consciousness. This defect can be understood as excessive self-awareness. Normally most of the complex information processing which is continuously required by even simple acts of perception, language and thought goes on below the level of awareness; whereas in schizophrenic patients some of this processing, or the results of this processing, not in themselves abnormal, become conscious. This excessive awareness can account for the typical symptoms of schizophrenia and explains many of the specific cognitive abnormalities found in schizophrenic patients.
Discusses the role of self-schemata in cognitive models of depression and evaluates the empirical support for this notion according to criteria consonant with this construct's usage in cognitive psychology and social cognition. Whereas the concept of a negative self-schema was initially proposed as a distal cognitive diathesis to depressive disorder, measurement problems have hindered a meaningful test of this construct's predictive capacity. Furthermore, conceptual and design-related confounds in extant depressive-schema studies prevent the demonstration of schematic processing independent of the effects of depressed mood on the dependent variables used. It is argued that reconceptualizing self-schema in cognitive-structural terms may help address and resolve some of these current problems. For example, methods used to assess more general knowledge structures, such as semantic networks, might be profitably used to verify whether information about the self is similarly organized. This can then begin the process of specifying the exact nature of the information thought to be stored within this structure and allow researchers to move beyond a simple dichotomy of positive and negative elements to models that better reflect the complexity of self-construal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Measured depression-related cognitions and self-esteem in 998 adults who were followed for 1 yr. Ss completed a battery of tests including the Subjective Probability Questionnaire, Personal Beliefs Inventory, and Multidimensional Multiattributional Causality Scale. 63 Ss were depressed at the time of assessment, 85 became depressed during the follow-up period, and 115 had a history of depression but were not depressed at the initial assessment. Results are generally consistent with the hypothesis that depression-related cognitions arise concomitantly with an episode of depression. The currently depressed Ss differed from nondepressed Ss as expected; however, Ss who were to become depressed during the course of the study did not differ from controls on the cognitive measures. In addition, depressive cognitions did not seem to be permanent residuals of an episode. Although the depression-related cognitions did not predict future depression, they did predict improvement; depressed Ss with more negative cognitions were significantly less likely to improve during the follow-up period. (16 ref)
Detecting the effects of latent depressive schemas constitutes an important step toward validating A. T. Beck's (1967) tenet of the depressive cognitive style as a causal factor in the onset and relapse of major depression. The authors examined whether a sample of formerly clinically depressed individuals continued to exhibit a negatively biased information-processing style in the absence of concurrent depressed mood. As predicted, the scores of formerly depressed individuals on 2 questionnaires tapping dysfunctional thinking did not differ from those of never depressed individuals, but responses of formerly depressed individuals were negatively biased on 2 of 3 information-processing measures administered following a self-focus manipulation. These results provide evidence for the persistence of a depressive schema in individuals who have recovered from major depression.
Hypotheses about the self-perpetuating properties of ruminative responses to depressed mood were tested in 2 laboratory studies and 2 questionnaire studies with dysphoric and nondysphoric Ss. Studies 1 and 2 supported the hypothesis that dysphorics induced to engage in self-focused rumination would report reduced willingness to engage in pleasant, distracting activities that could lift their moods, even if they believed they would enjoy such activities. Studies 3 and 4 confirmed the hypothesis that dysphorics induced to ruminate in response to their moods would feel they were gaining insight into their problems and their emotions. Therefore, they might have avoided distraction because they believed it would interfere with their efforts to understand themselves. Depressed mood alone, in the absence of rumination, was not associated with either lower willingness to participate in distractions or an enhanced sense of insightfulness.
We examined the relationship between ruminative and distracting styles of responding to depressed mood and the duration of mood. Seventy-nine subjects kept accounts of their moods and responses to their moods for 30 consecutive days. The majority of subjects (83%) showed consistent styles of responding to depressed mood. Regression analyses suggested that the more ruminative responses subjects engaged in, the longer their periods of depressed mood, even after taking into account the initial severity of the mood. In addition, women were more likely than men to have a ruminative response style and on some measures to have more severe and long-lasting periods of depression.
The study investigated selective processing of emotional information in anxiety and depression using a modified Stroop color naming task. Anxious (n = 19), depressed (n = 18), and normal control (n = 18) subjects were required to name the background colors of anxiety-related, depression-related, positive, categorized, and uncategorized neutral words. Half of the words were presented supraliminally, half subliminally. Anxious subjects, compared with depressed and normal subjects, showed relatively slower color naming for both supraliminal and subliminal negative words. The results suggest a preattentive processing bias for negative information in anxiety.
Research on cognitive biases in depression suggests that deficient control of attention underlies impairments in memory for emotionally neutral events. Such impairments might result from general difficulties in focusing and sustaining attention, specific and habitual priorities to attend to matters of personal concern, or both. This paper considers these alternative means of impairment in the context of a review of selected theories and findings; a test of the framework is illustrated; and related considerations are discussed.
A number of recent laboratory and prospectivefield studies suggest that the tendency to ruminateabout dysphoric moods is associated with more severe andpersistent negative emotional experiences (e.g., Morrow & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990;Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1991). The current paperreports two studies that tested the hypotheses that (a)ruminative response styles act as a trait vulnerabilityto dysphoria, particularly to relativelypersistent episodes of dysphoria; (b) aspects ofrumination that are not likely to be contaminated withthe presence and severity of previous symptomatology(introspection/self-isolation, self-blame) demonstrate vulnerability effects;and (c) rumination mediates the effects of gender andneuroticism on vulnerability to dysphoria. Consistentsupport was found for each of these hypotheses. Overall, our data suggest that rumination mightreflect an important cognitive manifestation ofneuroticism that increases vulnerability to episodes ofpersistent dysphoria.
Persistence of affect and attentional and memory biases in dysphoria-prone and nonvulnerable individuals were investigated. In two experiments, neverdysphoric (ND) individuals and previously dysphoric (PD) individuals underwent a positive and a negative autobiographical mood-induction procedure (MIP). Following each MIP, individuals participated in an emotional Stroop task. Participants also rated their mood both immediately after, and five minutes after, each MIP. In addition, in Experiment 2, incidental memory for Stroop stimuli was assessed. PD participants reported more persistent negative affect following a negative MIP than did ND participants. Although PD and ND participants did not differ from each other with respect to their performance on the emotion Stroop task, PD participants demonstrated significantly better memory for negative stimuli than did ND participants. Thus, affect dysregulation and memory biases of PD participants outlasted the dysphoric episode. These findings suggest that memory biases and affect regulation style may play a causal role in susceptibility to depression.
Part 1 Introduction: a multidisciplinary approach the goals of attention the manifestations of attention the expression of attention plan of the book. Part 2 Selective attention: early theories of selective attention selection of what, where and which six properties of the attended area metaphors of selective attention selection of an object in a cluttered field experimental tasks selective attention to actions summary. Part 3 Preparatory attention and maintenance attention: preparatory attention attentional preparation or cognitive expectation? perceptual preparations for objects and their attributes perceptual preparation for locations of objects the "peaked distribution" of attentional activity shifting visual attention through space the resource view of preparatory attention maintenance attention summary. Part 4 Attentional processing in cortical areas: areas of specialized (modular) processing attention to object information in ventral cortical streams attention to spatial information in dorsal cortical streams attentional control versus attentional expression summary. Part 5 Attentional processing in two subcortical areas the superior colliculus the thalamus thalamic circuitry. Part 6 A cognitive-neuroscience model of attention processes in shape identification an experimental trial containing a warning signal and a target summary - the expression, mechanism and control of attention in shape identification. Part 7 Synopsis: a cognitive-neuroscience theory of attention.
The CES-D scale is a short self-report scale designed to measure depressive symptomatology in the general population. The items of the scale are symptoms associated with depression which have been used in previously validated longer scales. The new scale was tested in household interview surveys and in psychiatric settings. It was found to have very high internal consistency and adequate test- retest repeatability. Validity was established by pat terns of correlations with other self-report measures, by correlations with clinical ratings of depression, and by relationships with other variables which support its construct validity. Reliability, validity, and factor structure were similar across a wide variety of demographic characteristics in the general population samples tested. The scale should be a useful tool for epidemiologic studies of de pression.
The account of cognitive vulnerability to depression offered by Beck's cognitive model is summarised. As this account currently lacks consistent empirical support, an alternative, related, account is presented. This proposes that, once a person is initially depressed, an important factor that determines whether their depression remains mild or transient, or becomes more severe and persistent, is the nature of the negative cognitive processes and constructs that become active and accessible in the depressed state. These interact with the nature of environmental difficulties, available social support, and biological factors, to determine whether a depression-maintaining cognitive-affective vicious cycle will be set up.Results from studies specifically designed to test predictions from this account have yielded positive results. Findings consistent with the hypothesis have also been obtained in other prospective studies which have shown that cognitive measures, administered in the depressed state, predict the future course of depression independently of initial levels of depression.The hypothesis is elaborated to incorporate the demonstrated relationship of elevated neuroticism to risk and persistence of depression. Recent views on the nature of sex differences in rates of depression, and on the relationship of attributional style to depression are also compatible with the hypothesis. It is concluded that the hypothesis has encouraging preliminary support.SUMMARYTwo broad aspects of cognitive vulnerability to depression can be distinguished. The first is the tendency to evaluate certain types of life event in ways which will produce intense rather than mild depression. This is the aspect of vulnerability on which Beck's cognitive model appears to concentrate. There are considerable difficulties in assessing this aspect of Beck's model and it is not consistently supported by comparison of recovered depressed patients with control groups.The second aspect of cognitive vulnerability relates to the cognitive processes and constructs that become active and accessible once a person is in a state of depression. Within this approach, vulnerability to onset and vulnerability to persistence of depression can be roughly distinguished, depending on whether the focus is on the period when the depression has been present for only a brief period, or is mild, or whether depression has already existed for some time and reached at least moderate severity. The account presented here proposes that a crucial factor determining whether an initially mild or transient depressed state remains mild or soon disappears, or becomes more severe and persistent, is whether a vicious cycle based on a reciprocally reinforcing relationship between depressed mood and negative cognitive processing can become established. The probability that this cycle will become established is, in turn, a function of a complex interaction between the environmental difficulties facing a person, the support available to them, their biological state, and the nature of the cognitive processes and constructs that are active and accessible in the depressed state. The kind of cognitive process and constructs that are most active and accessible in the depressed state will be a function both of the patterns of cognitive processing that are characteristic of the person in their normal mood state (such as those related to neuroticism), and of the patterns of cognitive processing that become active in the depressed state. It is on these latter that the differential activation hypothesis concentrates. It suggests that individual differences in the cognitive processes and constructs that become active and accessible in the depressed' state can make an important contribution to whether an initial state of depression becomes more intense, or fades away, and whether, once established, depression of moderate severity persists a long time or a short time. In particular, it is proposed that processes and constructs related to global negative characterological evaluations of the self or that, in other ways, lead to interpretations of experience as highly aversive and uncontrollable are likely to act to intensify and maintain depression.Two investigations specifically designed to test predictions from the differential activation hypothesis yielded positive results. Further supportive evidence is available from a number of other studies which have examined the relationship between cognitive measures, administered in the depressed state, and the future course of depression. Such studies haverecurringly found that persistence or return of depression is associated with initially high scores on measures of negative cognition, and this association remains when the effects of initial depression level are partialled out.In addition to this encouraging preliminary empirical support, the differential activation hypothesis has the further attraction that it can incorporate into this account the well established finding that neuroticism is associated with risk of becoming depressed, and of depression persisting. Further, it is quite consistent with recent proposals related to sex differences in rates of depression, and to the relationship of attributional style to depression.
The affective congruency effect, wherein shorter response latencies are observed for affectively congruent prime-target pairs in the evaluation task (i.e. the target is evaluated as positive or negative) has often been interpreted in terms of a spread of activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. In the present article, it is argued that the effect might be due to a conflict between the responses that are activated by the prime and target, assuming that the prime serves as a distractor for processing the target. If such a conflict occurs, this would result in a negative priming effect, that is, an affective incongruency of prime (e.g. death) and target (e.g. wise) on trial n-1 (prime-trial) will result in a slowing of the response on trial n (probe-trial) if the probe target (e.g. lonely) is affectively congruent to the distractor of the prime-trial. This hypothesis was confirmed in Experiment 1 (N = 35) with a sequential presentation of distractor and target (i.e. SOA = 300m sec) and further corroborated by Experiment 2 (N = 72) with a factorial manipulation of sequential and simultaneous (SOA = 0m sec) presentation. These results favour a view that affective congruency effects in the evaluation task are due to response path interference processes which are resolved by an inhibition of the tendency to respond to the distractor.
Traces the development of the cognitive approach to psychopathology and psy hotherapy from common-sense observations and folk wisdom, to a more sophisticated understanding of the emotional disorders, and finally to the application of rational techniques to correct the misconceptions and conceptual distortions that form the matrix of the neuroses. The importance of engaging the patient in exploration of his inner world and of obtaining a sharp delineation of specific thoughts and underlying assumptions is emphasized. (91/4 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This chapter reviews the empirical evidence for inhibitory mechanisms in attention and their theoretical implications. Natural environments offer multiple sources of information that could potentially control human behavior. Yet humans respond to only some limited subset of those sources, and selected, goal-appropriate objects and events are referred to as “attended,” whereas the remaining sources of information are “ignored.” Inhibition of irrelevant processing appears to be an important function of selective attention. This new perspective has important implications for real-world cognitive functioning. Subject populations that are distinguished either clinically or developmentally by cognitive deficits are often unable to inhibit certain kinds of distracting information. Responses to an object may be slower and/or less accurate if a related object has recently been ignored. This negative-priming effect has been demonstrated for many different kinds of stimulus materials, vocal and manual response modes, and a wide variety of judgments including identification, classification, matching, counting, and localization.
The present study was designed in an effort to replicate earlier research utilizing a priming methodology to examine cognitive organization in depression. Unipolar depressed patients (N =18), normal subjects (N =14), and normal subjects who were exposed to a self-focus manipulation (N =14) were asked to color-name personal adjectives which had previously been rated for the degree of self-description. Each experimental trial consisted of the presentation of a prime word followed by a target word printed in color, and the subject's task was to name the color of the target and then recall the prime. Color-naming was significantly influenced by the nature of the prime/target relatedness, such that longer latencies were obtained when the prime and target were both rated as personally meaningful, than when only the target was rated as meaningful and the prime was not. This effect was obtained for adjectives rated as highly self-descriptive with both depressed patients and normal subjects who were in a heightened state of self-awareness. Subjects who were not made self-aware showed a much weaker relatedness effect in this condition. With respect to adjectives which subjects rated as extremely nondescriptive, both depressed and normal subjects showed a relatedness effect while self-aware normals did not. Although admittedly tentative in nature, this latter finding would suggest that the scope of information represented in an individual's self-structure contains elements of both positive and negative identity.
I propose that the ways people respond to their own symptoms of depression influence the duration of these symptoms. People who engage in ruminative responses to depression, focusing on their symptoms and the possible causes and consequences of their symptoms, will show longer depressions than people who take action to distract themselves from their symptoms. Ruminative responses prolong depression because they allow the depressed mood to negatively bias thinking and interfere with instrumental behavior and problem-solving. Laboratory and field studies directly testing this theory have supported its predictions. I discuss how response styles can explain the greater likelihood of depression in women than men. Then I intergrate this response styles theory with studies of coping with discrete events. The response styles theory is compared to other theories of the duration of depression. Finally, I suggest what may help a depressed person to stop engaging in ruminative responses and how response styles for depression may develop.
A model of selective attention is proposed which contains a number of properties. First, stimuli which are irrelevant to the subjects' task can be analyzed to semantic levels automatically, and such stimuli can produce intrusion/interference effects. Second, two mechanisms by which selection is achieved are habituation to, and inhibition of, these irrelevant stimuli. A series of studies demonstrates that both the ability to process automatically irrelevant stimuli and the habituation mechanisms of attention are observable by Grade 2, whereas the inhibitory mechanism is not always evident at this stage. It is suggested that the greater distractability of children in certain situations may be due in part to the underutilization of this inhibitory mechanism. We further propose that children may be able to employ inhibitory mechanisms in more familiar perceptual-motor tasks.
Bower's (1981) associative network model of mood and cognition predicts that depression will selectively facilitate the perception of negatively toned words. Recent studies by Clark et al. (1983) and by Powell & Hemsley (1984) have, however, produced apparently discrepant results. Alternative means of accommodating the discrepancy are considered, and the current experiment empirically distinguishes between these possibilities. The results are inconsistent with Bower's model.
A priming paradigm was employed to investigate the processing of an ignored object during selection of an attended object. Two issues were investigated: the level of internal representation achieved for the ignored object, and the subsequent fate of this representation. In Experiment 1 a prime display containing two superimposed objects was briefly presented. One second later a probe display was presented containing an object to be named. If the ignored object in the prime display was the same as the subsequent probe, naming latencies were impaired. This effect is termed negative priming. It suggests that internal representations of the ignored object may become associated with inhibition during selection. Thus, selection of a subsequent probe object requiring these inhibited representations is delayed. Experiment 2 replicated the negative priming effect with a shorter inter-stimulus interval. Experiment 3 examined the priming effects of both the ignored and the selected objects. The effect of both identity repetition and a categorical relationship between prime and probe stimuli were investigated. The data showed that for a stimulus selected from the prime display, naming of the same object in the probe display was facilitated. When the same stimulus was ignored in the prime display, however, naming of it in the probe display was again impaired (negative priming). That negative priming was also demonstrated with categorically related objects suggests that ignored objects achieve categorical levels of representation, and that the inhibition may be at this level.
Attentional biases were assessed with a probe detection task in anxious (N = 17), depressed (N = 17) and normal control (N = 15) subjects. Word pairs were presented visually, with a dot probe following one word of each pair. Allocation of attention to the spatial position of the words was determined from response latencies to the probes. Half the word pairs were presented supraliminally, half subliminally. The anxious and depressed groups showed an attentional bias towards supraliminal negative words, in comparison with normal controls. The depressed group unexpectedly showed greater vigilance for supraliminal anxiety-relevant words than the anxious group. The anxious group shifted their attention towards the spatial location of negative words presented subliminally. The results support the hypothesis of an anxiety-related bias in preconscious processes.
Two studies investigated the relationship between attentional biases for negative information and dysphoria--both induced (Study 1) and naturally occurring (Study 2). In a modified dot probe task a series of word pairs was presented, and Ss responded to probes that replaced one of the words in each pair. The stimuli included depression-related, anxiety-related and neutral words. To examine the time course of the attentional biases, there were three exposure durations of the word pairs: 14 ms (+ 186 ms mask); 500 ms and 1000 ms. In Study 1, the depressed mood induction procedure was associated with greater vigilance for depression-related words at 500 ms, with a similar trend at 1000 ms. In Study 2, measures of depressed mood and vulnerability correlated positively with vigilance for negative words in the 1000 ms condition. There was no evidence from either study that depressed mood was associated with a pre-conscious bias for negative words (i.e. in the 14 ms masked exposure condition). However, this pre-conscious bias was associated with high trait anxiety in Study 2, consistent with previous research. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical and empirical work on cognitive biases in clinical and non-clinical anxiety and depression.
Self-schema in major depression: Replication and extension of a priming methodology. [Special Issue: Selfhood processes and emotional disorders Cognitive vulnerability to persistent depression
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Selective attention and the inhibitory control of cognition Interference and inhibition in cognition (pp. 207±261) Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes Effects of rumination and distraction on naturally occurring depressed mood
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Consciousness, information processing and schizophrenia Cognitive biases and affect persistence in previously dysphoric and never-dysphoric individuals
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Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders An inventory for measuring depression Mood and memory Attentional biases for negative information in induced and naturally occurring dysphoria
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