Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior (CCNU), Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430070, China.
School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Dec 29;20(1):544. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20010544.
Anxiety and depression have been shown to negatively influence the processing of emotional information in working memory. However, most studies have examined anxiety-related or depression-related working memory deficits independently, without considering their high co-morbidity. We tested the effects of emotional valence on working memory performance among healthy young adults with varying levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Ninety young adults aged between 18-24 (51 female) completed an emotional 2-back task in which positive, negative, and neutral images were presented. Multi-level modeling was used to examine anxiety and depressive symptoms as predictors of response accuracy and latency across the three emotional valence conditions. The results showed that participants responded to negative images with the highest accuracy and to positive images with the lowest accuracy. Both negative and positive images elicited slower responses than neutral images. Importantly, we found that more severe anxiety symptoms predicted a smaller difference in response accuracy between negative and neutral stimuli, whereas more severe depressive symptoms predicted a larger updating reaction time difference between positive and neutral stimuli. These findings demonstrated the uniquely anxiety-related deficits in processing negative contents and the uniquely depression-related deficits in updating positive contents in working memory, thus highlighting the necessity of novel cognitive bias modification interventions targeting the anxiety-specific and depression-specific deficits in working memory.
焦虑和抑郁已被证明会对工作记忆中情绪信息的处理产生负面影响。然而，大多数研究都是独立地考察与焦虑相关或与抑郁相关的工作记忆缺陷，而没有考虑到它们的高共病性。我们测试了在具有不同程度焦虑和抑郁症状的健康年轻成年人中，情绪效价对工作记忆表现的影响。90 名年龄在 18-24 岁之间的年轻人（51 名女性）完成了一项情绪 2 -back 任务，其中呈现了积极、消极和中性的图像。多层次建模用于检验焦虑和抑郁症状作为预测三个情绪效价条件下反应准确性和潜伏期的指标。结果表明，参与者对负性图像的反应准确性最高，对正性图像的反应准确性最低。负性和正性图像的反应时间均长于中性图像。重要的是，我们发现，更严重的焦虑症状预测了负性和中性刺激之间反应准确性差异较小，而更严重的抑郁症状预测了正性和中性刺激之间更新反应时间差异较大。这些发现表明，在工作记忆中，负性内容的处理存在独特的焦虑相关缺陷，而正性内容的更新存在独特的抑郁相关缺陷，这突出了针对工作记忆中焦虑特异性和抑郁特异性缺陷的新型认知偏差修正干预的必要性。
