Division of Research, Evaluation and Documentation, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Bethel, Bielefeld, Germany.
Psychiatry Res. 2010 Jun 30;178(1):106-11. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2009.04.012. Epub 2010 May 10.
Patients with major depression (MDD) often report relevant cognitive problems in everyday life while performance in standardised neuropsychological tests is not severely disturbed. This discrepancy may partly be due to the differences between the demands of everyday life with the presence of emotionally relevant distractors and standardised neuropsychological settings without those distractors. In the present study, we hypothesise that patients with major depression (MDD) show an increased distractibility towards emotionally negative stimuli and that this distractibility is related to complaints of cognitive functioning in everyday life. Thirty MDD patients and 48 healthy participants performed our recently developed learning paradigm with neutrally and negatively valenced distraction as well as without distraction. Both groups also performed a neuropsychological test battery as well as self- and observer ratings of impairments in memory and attention in every day life. In the MDD sample, cognitive impairments were reported by the patients and their relatives but were not found in the neuropsychological tests. We found a trend towards a poorer memory performance with negatively valenced distraction in the MDD sample when compared to the performance of healthy subjects. However, this impairment was not related to the self- and observer ratings. This result may be due to the fact that the distractors were not personally relevant to the subjects whereas everyday life implies such distractors. Further research is needed to explore everyday cognitive functioning of patients with MDD.
患有重度抑郁症（MDD）的患者在日常生活中常常报告相关认知问题，而在标准化神经心理学测试中的表现并未受到严重干扰。这种差异部分可能归因于日常生活中的需求与不存在这些干扰因素的标准化神经心理学环境之间的差异。在本研究中，我们假设患有重度抑郁症（MDD）的患者对情绪负性刺激的分心程度增加，并且这种分心程度与日常生活中的认知功能抱怨有关。我们让 30 名 MDD 患者和 48 名健康参与者完成了我们最近开发的学习范式，该范式包含中性和负性情绪分心以及无分心的情况。两组参与者还进行了神经心理学测试和对日常生活中记忆和注意力损伤的自我和观察者评定。在 MDD 样本中，患者及其亲属报告了认知障碍，但在神经心理学测试中并未发现这些障碍。与健康对照组相比，MDD 样本在带有负性情绪分心的情况下，记忆表现呈现出一种趋势，表现较差。但是，这种损害与自我和观察者的评定无关。该结果可能是由于干扰因素与受试者无关，而日常生活中存在这种干扰因素。需要进一步的研究来探索 MDD 患者的日常认知功能。
