Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main St. Houston TX 77005, United States.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main St. Houston TX 77005, United States.
Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2023 Nov;205:107824. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2023.107824. Epub 2023 Sep 4.
Individuals with depression exhibit dysfunctional emotion regulation, general episodic memory deficits, and a negativity bias, where negative experiences are better remembered. Recent work suggests that the negativity bias in depression may be driven by enhanced mnemonic discrimination, a memory measure that relies on hippocampal pattern separation - a computation that processes experiences with overlapping features as unique. Previously, we found that individuals with depressive symptoms show enhanced negative and impaired neutral mnemonic discrimination. The current study aimed to investigate emotion regulation as an approach toward modifying memory encoding of negative and neutral events in individuals with depressive symptoms. Here we show that applying psychological distancing (a cognitive reappraisal strategy characterized by taking a third-person perspective toward negative events) during encoding was associated with reduced negative and enhanced neutral mnemonic discrimination during retrieval in individuals with depressive symptoms. These results suggest that applying emotion regulation techniques during encoding may provide an effective approach toward altering dysfunctional memory in those with depressive symptoms. Given that pharmacological treatments often fail to treat depression, emotion regulation provides a powerful and practical approach toward modifying cognitive and emotional processes. Future neuroimaging studies will be important to determine how emotion regulation impacts the neural mechanisms underlying these findings.
患有抑郁症的个体表现出情绪调节功能障碍、一般情景记忆缺陷和负性偏差，即负面经历更容易被记住。最近的研究表明，抑郁症中的负性偏差可能是由增强的记忆辨别驱动的，记忆辨别是一种依赖海马模式分离的记忆测量方法——一种将具有重叠特征的体验作为独特的处理的计算。此前，我们发现有抑郁症状的个体表现出增强的负性和受损的中性记忆辨别。本研究旨在探讨情绪调节作为一种改变抑郁症状个体对负性和中性事件记忆编码的方法。在这里，我们表明，在编码过程中应用心理距离（一种认知重评策略，其特征是对负性事件采取第三人称视角）与抑郁症状个体在检索过程中负性记忆辨别降低和中性记忆辨别增强相关。这些结果表明，在编码过程中应用情绪调节技术可能是一种改变抑郁症状个体的功能失调性记忆的有效方法。鉴于药物治疗往往无法治疗抑郁症，情绪调节为改变认知和情绪过程提供了一种强大而实用的方法。未来的神经影像学研究将很重要，以确定情绪调节如何影响这些发现的神经机制。
