Cognitive dysfunction under emotional exposure: When participants with depression symptoms show no cognitive control

Abstract

Objective: Adaptive human behaviour requires cognitive control -the monitoring of actions and performance, to regulate and coordinate ongoing behaviour. Major depression is associated with neuropsychological differences in cognitive control, however behavioural experiments have failed to consistently reflect this. We explore this discrepancy. Method: Two experiments were conducted, in which participants completed an Emotional Stroop task, and the Beck Depression Inventory-II. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to judge the font colour of a printed word. The word could have emotional or non-emotional meaning. In Experiment 2, participants judged the font colour of the word, and also identified whether any letter was italicised. This manipulation was designed to induce errors to facilitate analysis. Results: Depression symptoms are linked to severe deficits in cognitive control following errors. In Experiment 1, for emotional words, major depression symptoms were associated with a failure to instigate behavioural adjustments following errors, leading to reduced performance (F(1,25) = 4.61, p = .042). For non-emotional content, we found major depression symptoms were associated with substantial adjustments following errors, mitigating reduced performance. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 using a more robust analysis (F (1,30) = 6.45, p = .017). Conclusions: These findings suggest that under emotional priming, major depression is marked by a failure to adapt behaviour in response to relevant environmental feedback. This work has implications for interpreting prior and future scientific findings, and may also inform clinical applications for depression treatment.

Untangling the relationship between work pressure and emotions in social media: a quantitative empirical study of construction industry

“…The sentiment intensity of a work-related post was found to have a positive impact on the comment quantity, which is consistent with previous studies, that is, posts with strong emotional coloring are more likely to attract other people's attention (Williams et al. , 2020).…”

“…The sentiment intensity of a work-related post was found to have a positive impact on the comment quantity, which is consistent with previous studies, that is, posts with strong emotional coloring are more likely to attract other people's attention (Williams et al, 2020). According to the comments we crawled from Weibo, comforting and encouraging content is common in negative sentiment posts, while praising content is more habitual in commenting on posts with positive sentiment.…”

“…Simultaneously, catchwords and slang are often used to express inner feelings through entertaining patterns (Lim et al, 2011;Silva et al, 2019). Some scholars found that the posts published on social media contain abundant sentiment content and the emotional coloring of the words in the posts shows the intensity of emotion (Williams et al, 2020). The posts sentiment is regarded as a representative model of online emotion, which has vital potential for emotion analysis (Tess, 2013).…”

“…, 2019). Some scholars found that the posts published on social media contain abundant sentiment content and the emotional coloring of the words in the posts shows the intensity of emotion (Williams et al. , 2020).…”