Emotional working memory in patients with major depressive disorder

Objective This study was performed to examine the working memory (WM) encoding and retrieval abilities in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and determine whether a mood-congruent memory effect is present. Methods The modified Sternberg WM paradigm with positive, negative, and neutral emotional pictures was used to investigate the WM abilities of 26 patients with MDD and 26 healthy controls (HCs). Results No significant difference in picture WM was found between the MDD and HC groups; however, the accuracy of picture position WM was significantly lower and the response time was significantly longer in the MDD than HC group, regardless of the picture or position WM. Additionally, in the MDD group, the accuracy of negative picture/position WM was significantly higher than that of positive picture/position WM. Conclusions These results suggest that in patients with MDD, spatial WM impairment was more severe than object WM. In addition, these patients’ WM retrieval was impaired, resulting in a decrease in WM retrieval ability, which may be an important cause of the slow thought in patients with MDD. Moreover, patients with depression have a mood-congruent memory effect, which may be an important factor in the occurrence and maintenance of depression.

Estado de ánimo y memoria autobiográfica: efectos sobre la intensidad de los recuerdos escolares

The influence of mood on memory for simple stimuli has been observed frequently. This paper examines the effect of mood on autobiographical memory, going to analyze (1) the presence of the mood-congruent memory effect in school memories and (2) the typical anomalies of the effect. We intend to study the biases that may affect, during retrieval, the subjective rating of relevant events in school history. We used a sample of college students assigned to different groups of mood induction. Three states (happy, sad or neutral mood) were induced by film material having emotional scenes. Memories intensity was recorded by the LIM method. The mood-congruent memory effect has been partial and asymmetric. Our results indicate that participants with happy mood tend to a greater rating of positive and negative events, whereas sad participants tend to more conservative valuations. Neutral-mood participants rated the positive events with a higher level than negative. These data suggest that the mood generates a preferred processing style which modulates the valuation of memories.