Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, United States.
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
J Affect Disord. 2018 Jan 1;225:404-412. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2017.08.037. Epub 2017 Aug 24.
Attentional and memory biases are viewed as crucial cognitive processes underlying symptoms of depression. However, it is still unclear whether these two biases are uniquely related to depression or whether they show substantial overlap.
We investigated the degree of specificity and overlap of attentional and memory biases for depressotypic stimuli in relation to depression and anxiety by means of meta-analytic commonality analysis. By including four published studies, we considered a pool of 463 healthy and subclinically depressed individuals, different experimental paradigms, and different psychological measures.
Memory bias is reliably and strongly related to depression and, specifically, to symptoms of negative mood, worthlessness, feelings of failure, and pessimism. Memory bias for negative information was minimally related to anxiety. Moreover, neither attentional bias nor the overlap between attentional and memory biases were significantly related to depression.
Limitations include cross-sectional nature of the study.
Our study showed that, across different paradigms and psychological measures, memory bias (and not attentional bias) represents a primary mechanism in depression.
注意和记忆偏差被视为抑郁症状的关键认知过程。然而，目前尚不清楚这两种偏差是否与抑郁有独特的关系，还是它们存在大量的重叠。
我们通过元分析共性分析研究了与抑郁和焦虑相关的抑郁型刺激的注意和记忆偏差的特异性和重叠程度。通过纳入四项已发表的研究，我们考虑了一个由 463 名健康和亚临床抑郁个体、不同的实验范式和不同的心理测量组成的样本。
记忆偏差与抑郁有可靠且强烈的关系，特别是与负面情绪、无价值感、失败感和悲观感有关。对负面信息的记忆偏差与焦虑的关系最小。此外，注意偏差和注意与记忆偏差之间的重叠都与抑郁无显著关系。
研究的局限性包括研究的横断面性质。
我们的研究表明，在不同的范式和心理测量中，记忆偏差（而不是注意偏差）是抑郁的主要机制。
