School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA.
School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA.
J Affect Disord. 2016 Jan 15;190:208-213. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2015.06.056. Epub 2015 Jul 29.
Depressive thoughts are known to persist in persons with depressed mood leading to rumination and exacerbation of depressive symptoms. What has not yet been examined is whether this persistence of depressive thoughts can lead to impairment of working memory (WM).
We assessed whether receiving a WM task featuring depressive cues could bias performance on a subsequent, non-depressive WM task for dysphoric individuals (DIs) compared to non-DIs.
DIs showed significantly attenuated performance on the WM task with depressive cues compared to non-DIs. Further, when DIs were given the WM task with depressive cues first, they showed deficits on a second WM task without depressive cues, compared to DIs given the non-depressive WM task first and non-DIs in either condition.
Unselected recruitment procedures did not permit balanced sample sizes in each group. Future research is needed to assess whether these results extend to a clinically depressed sample and whether WM deficits are the consequence of depressed mood, or a risk factor for the development and maintenance of depressed mood.
Results suggest that, for DIs, the influence of depressive cues on performance transfers to subsequent tasks in which these cues are no longer present. These results support the hypothesis that when depressive thoughts are part of depressed persons' conscious experience, cognitive deficits arise. Further, these results suggest an ecologically-relevant mechanism by which day-to-day cognitive deficits in depression can develop.
已知抑郁情绪会导致抑郁思维持续存在，从而引发沉思和抑郁症状恶化。目前尚未研究的是，这种抑郁思维的持续存在是否会导致工作记忆（WM）受损。
我们评估了在抑郁个体（DIs）和非抑郁个体（NDIs）中，接受具有抑郁线索的 WM 任务是否会影响随后的非抑郁 WM 任务的表现。
与非 DIs 相比，DIs 在具有抑郁线索的 WM 任务中的表现明显减弱。此外，当 DIs 首先接受具有抑郁线索的 WM 任务时，与 DIs 首先接受非抑郁 WM 任务和任何条件下的 NDIs 相比，他们在没有抑郁线索的第二个 WM 任务中表现出缺陷。
未经过选择的招募程序使得每组的样本量无法平衡。未来的研究需要评估这些结果是否扩展到临床抑郁样本，以及 WM 缺陷是否是抑郁情绪的结果，还是抑郁情绪发展和维持的风险因素。
结果表明，对于 DIs 来说，抑郁线索对表现的影响会转移到随后不再存在这些线索的任务中。这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即当抑郁思维成为抑郁个体意识体验的一部分时，就会出现认知缺陷。此外，这些结果表明了一种与日常认知缺陷在抑郁症中发展相关的生态相关机制。
