Does depression disrupt working memory for emotional information?
People with depression benefit just as much as healthy individuals from a boost in working memory when processing emotionally negative information.
Source
Affective enhancement of working memory is maintained in depression
What they did
The researchers tested working memory capacity using an emotional reading span task across three different experiments. In the first experiment, exactly 123 participants from the community made semantic judgments on sentences and tried to memorize final words. The second experiment used the same task to compare 14 never-depressed individuals with 21 individuals diagnosed with recurrent depression. The third experiment tested 70 participants, requiring them to rate how much they agreed with the sentences on a scale ranging from 1 to 7.
What they found
Participants in all experiments showed better working memory when processing depressing sentences compared to neutral sentences. Surprisingly, depression severity did not alter this memory boost. Across the three experiments, the difference in emotional working memory capacity between individuals with clinical depression and healthy controls was minimal, with a pooled effect size of 0.06.
The limits
What it doesn't show
These experiments do not rule out the possibility that emotional information might disrupt working memory if the emotional stimuli were completely irrelevant to the task, rather than being sentences that participants had to actively read. Additionally, some individual groups had small sample sizes, such as only 14 healthy controls in one comparison. Finally, the rating task in the third experiment only produced a moderate average rating of 5.00 for depressing sentences among the depressed group, meaning the negative statements might not have been emotionally intense enough to cause cognitive interference.
Key terms
- Working memory capacity (WMC)
- The ability to focus on task-relevant information and block out distractions while holding information in mind.
- Major depressive disorder (MDD)
- A clinical mental health condition characterized by persistent low mood, loss of interest, and cognitive difficulties.
- Complex span task
- A cognitive test that measures working memory by requiring participants to perform a processing activity while simultaneously memorizing target items.
- Dual competition framework
- A theory proposing that emotional stimuli compete for both perceptual and executive resources, enhancing or impairing performance depending on threat levels.
- Self-referential processing
- The cognitive act of relating external information, such as statements or words, to oneself and one's own identity.
- Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS)
- A questionnaire used to measure negative, rigid beliefs and cognitive vulnerabilities that make individuals susceptible to depression.
Flashcards
Want these cards to stick?
Save the deck to NoteFren and study it with spaced repetition.
Quiz yourself
Historically, why were individuals with affective disorders thought to experience executive functioning difficulties?
Common questions
Why does emotional information sometimes improve working memory?
According to the dual competition framework, mildly emotional information can capture attention and prioritize cognitive processing, which actually enhances performance on tasks containing those emotional elements.
How did the researchers measure working memory in this study?
They used an emotional reading span task where participants read neutral or depressing sentences, made a judgment about them, and then had to recall the random neutral words presented at the end of those sentences.
Did people with depression perform worse on the working memory task overall?
No, the study consistently found that individuals with major depressive disorder, those in remission, and those with high depressive symptoms performed just as well as healthy controls on this emotional working memory task.
Why did this study find different results from previous work on dysphoric students?
The authors suggest that earlier studies in high-functioning students might not reflect the psychological processes of clinically depressed individuals, or that those studies confounded emotional content with the type of decision required.
More on Working memory