Choice Reaction Times in Depressive States

Abstract

An experiment was performed in which two components of response latency, decision time (DT) and movement time (MT), were measured in two relatively homogeneous samples of neurotic and psychotic depressive patients, together with a normal control group. It was found that whereas both DT and MT were significantly longer in the depressive samples than in the control sample, only DT was significantly longer in the psychotic than in the neurotic depressive sample. Thus while both DT and MT were elevated among the depressive samples relative to the control sample, only DT was further sensitive to clinical variations within the depressive state. DT was found to increase directly with depressive severity among an undifferentiated sample of acute depressives, which on further analysis proved to hold for the neurotic depressive sample only. MT was found to increase directly with age among the psychotic depressive sample. No other age influences were found on response latencies of depressive patients. These results are discussed in terms of a postulated impairment of the central information-processing mechanisms, as an explanation of psychomotor slowing among depressive patients.

Relationship of mild depression to psychological deficit in college students

“…Consequently, we prefer to tentatively view the results as indicating that a depressed mood may be associated with slower perceptual processing. Such a conclusion would be supported by some research with other paradigms on clinically depressed samples (e.g., Byrne, 1976;Payne & Hewlett, 1960).…”

Effects of sertraline on depressive symptoms and attentional and executive functions in major depression

“…Cognitive slowing in depression is the psychological counterpart of motor slowing, which accompanies depression. Some authors [e.g., Byrne, 1976] showed that this slowing affects as much the central aspect (decision making) as the peripheral aspect (motor aspect) of RT. While control subjects produced stable performances from one session to another, there was a significant improvement in RTs for depressed subjects after the first 3 weeks of treatment, which indicated improvement in psychomotor slowing under antidepressant treatment.…”

Interpretation of Ambiguous Information in Girls at Risk for Depression

“…Second, Mogg et al assessed comprehension latencies for entire sentences, which increases variability in reaction times. This high variability, compounded by the fact that depressed individuals tend to exhibit variable reaction times in general (Byrne 1976), may have attenuated group differences in response latencies. In contrast, the text stimuli used in the present study were explicitly self-referential, and latencies used to examine group differences were in response to a single word that completed each three-sentence story, thus reducing variability in reaction times.…”