MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Cambridge, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK.
Front Psychol. 2013 Nov 27;4:888. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00888. eCollection 2013.
Depression is associated with significant difficulty staying "in the moment" as the mind tends to wander away from current activity to focus instead on personal concerns. Mind-wandering (MW) may in some instances be a precursor for depressive rumination, a thinking style believed to confer vulnerability to the likelihood and extent of depression. Thus, MW may be not only a consequence but also a cause of low mood. Identifying a paradigm that could modulate MW, particularly in depressed individuals, would allow future studies to test whether elevated rates of MW causally drive cognitive-affective features of depression, such as rumination and anhedonia. This study therefore explored the feasibility of using an existing task manipulation to modulate behavioral and self-report indices of MW in participants with varying levels of self-reported dysphoria. Participants completed two go/no-go tasks-the SART and a high target probability task-and measures of state and trait MW. The two tasks were identical in all respects apart from the lower probability of no-go targets on the SART, a feature considered to encourage mindless, or inattentive, responding. Across participants, errors of commission (a behavioral indicator of MW) were elevated on the SART relative to the high probability task, a pattern that was particularly pronounced in dysphoric participants. Dysphoric individuals furthermore reported elevated levels of MW, though the modulation of these subjective reports by task was present to a similar rather than greater extent in the dysphoric individuals. These findings provide encouraging preliminary support for the use of this paradigm as one that modulates MW in depressed individuals. The implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.
抑郁与难以“活在当下”密切相关，因为思维往往会从当前的活动中游离出来，转而关注个人问题。思维漫游（MW）在某些情况下可能是抑郁性反刍的前兆，而反刍思维方式被认为容易导致抑郁的可能性和严重程度增加。因此，MW 不仅是情绪低落的结果，也是其原因。如果能够找到一种范式来调节 MW，特别是在抑郁患者中，未来的研究就可以测试 MW 是否会导致抑郁的认知-情感特征，如反刍和快感缺失。因此，本研究探讨了利用现有的任务操作来调节不同程度自我报告的苦恼参与者的 MW 的行为和自我报告指标的可行性。参与者完成了两个 Go/No-Go 任务——SART 和高目标概率任务，以及状态和特质 MW 的测量。这两个任务在所有方面都是相同的，除了 SART 上的无靶标出现概率较低，这一特征被认为鼓励了无意识或不注意的反应。在所有参与者中，与高概率任务相比，SART 上的错误率（MW 的行为指标）更高，而在苦恼参与者中，这一模式更为明显。苦恼个体报告的 MW 水平也更高，但在该个体中，任务对这些主观报告的调节程度与在非苦恼个体中相似，而不是更大。这些发现为使用这一范式来调节抑郁个体的 MW 提供了令人鼓舞的初步支持。讨论了这些结果的意义和未来研究的方向。
