Affective enhancement of working memory is maintained in depression.

Abstract

We currently know little about how performance on assessments of working memory capacity (WMC) that are designed to mirror the concurrent task demands of daily life are impacted by the presence of affective information, nor how those effects may be modulated by depression—a syndrome where sufferers report global difficulties with executive processing. Across 3 experiments, we investigated WMC for sets of neutral words in the context of processing either neutral or affective (depressogenic) sentences, which had to be judged on semantic accuracy (Experiments 1 and 2) or self-reference (Experiment 3). Overall, WMC was significantly better in the context of depressogenic compared with neutral sentences. However, there was no support for this effect being modulated by symptoms of depression (Experiment 1) or the presence of recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD; Experiments 2 and 3). Implications of these findings for cognitive theories of the role of WM in depression are discussed in the context of a growing body of research showing no support for a differential impact of depressogenic compared with neutral information on WM accuracy.

The impact of affective information on working memory: A pair of meta-analytic reviews of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.

“…To further explore the role of motivational salience in WM and executive control more broadly, careful consideration should be given to the nature of the positive and negative stimuli used in research. The type of stimuli should be theory-driven and tap into affective concerns relevant to the study population under investigation (e.g., social stimuli in adolescence; Mueller, Cromheeke, Siugzdaite, & Boehler, 2017; or negative self-referential processing in depression Schweizer et al, 2018) and the construct under investigation (e.g., survival relevance; Lindström & Bohlin, 2012).…”

“…Understanding the effects of other individual difference variables (e.g., factors that influence affective processing including gender and personality; Fischer, Kret, & Broekens, 2018; Hamann & Canli, 2004; Kret & De Gelder, 2012; Speed et al, 2015) not modeled in the current analyses will therefore constitute an important next step in elucidating the impact of affective information on WM performance. Characterizing the relation between these individual differences and the impact of affective information on cognition is especially relevant in the context of recent findings showing that self-relevant information may particularly tax executive resources (Dai, Rahman, Lau, Sook Kim, & Deldin, 2015; Hubbard, Hutchison, Hambrick et al, 2016; Hubbard, Hutchison, Turner et al, 2016; Iordan et al, 2018; though see Schweizer et al, 2018, Experiment 3).…”

The impact of affective information on working memory: A pair of meta-analytic reviews of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence

“…To further explore the role of motivational salience in WM and executive control more broadly, careful consideration should be given to the nature of the positive and negative stimuli used in research. The type of stimuli should be theory-driven and tap into affective concerns relevant to the study population under investigation (e.g., social stimuli in adolescence; Mueller, Cromheeke, Siugzdaite, & Boehler, 2017; or negative self-referential processing in depressionSchweizer et al, 2018) and the construct under investigation (e.g., survival relevance;Lindström & Bohlin, 2012).…”

Interaction between working memory load and the ability to resist interference from negative distractors in dysphoria

“…For example, Owens et al (2012) found that compared to non-dysphoric individuals, dysphoric individuals performed significantly worse in filtering irrelevant information from WM. However, other studies found similar WM performance between dysphoricand non-dysphoric individuals (Hubbard et al, 2015;Schweizer et al, 2018). Research on the interference effect of emotional distractors on WM in dysphoria has also yielded inconsistent results.…”

“…In studies using the emotional 2‐back task, patients with current MDD (Levens & Gotlib, 2010) and remitted MDD (Levens & Gotlib, 2015) were slower to disengage from negative stimuli but faster to disengage from positive stimuli compared with healthy participants. While no performance difference was observed between patients with MDD and healthy controls when completing emotional WM tasks (Gartner et al, 2018; Schweizer et al, 2018), patients showed higher levels activation at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) than healthy controls (Gartner et al, 2018); the greater recruitment of the dlPFC and the dACC in WM reflect increased cognitive efforts in MDD when completing the WM task, so that they can perform at a level equivalent to healthy controls. Another study found that difficulties to remove irrelevant negative information from WM of depression were associated with hyperactivation at the dACC, the insula, and the superior parietal lobule (Foland‐Ross et al, 2013); in contrast, in healthy volunteers, higher levels of activation in these brain regions were observed when task‐irrelevant positive information was removed.…”