Depressive deficits in word identification and recall

Abstract

Depressed and nondepressed adults rated positive, negative, and neutral nouns for their emotional value or their physical curvature. Next, they tried to identify previously rated and unrated words that were presented quite briefly and masked. Depressed subjects' identification showed a reduced effect of prior exposure in the curvature task but no deficit when words had been rated for emotion. On a subsequent test of free recall, both a depressive deficit and a rating effect obtained. These results suggest that depressed people are less likely to process beyond the requirements of the task.

Selective memory and memory deficits in depressed inpatients

“…They basically differ in their assumptions about where in the cognitive system the main deficit in depression is located. According to the view of Hertel and colleagues [Hertel, 1994[Hertel, , 1998Hertel and Hardin, 1990], depression reduces the initiative to use beneficial strategies when their use is not demanded by the task. In terms of this ''initiative deficit'' point of view, impairments in depression arise when cognitive tasks allow the use of complex strategies but do not necessitate their spontaneous use.…”

The cognitive-initiative account of depression-related impairments in memory

“…Yet the extent to which a particular word comes to mind to provide a spelling, complete a stem, or relate to a cue should also reflect the extent to which that particular word was attended initially. The results of one experiment that revealed differences associated with depression perhaps did so because the words were poorly attended in the first place (Hertel, 1994).…”

“…First, in the experiment just described, the elimination of the opportunity to ruminate also eliminated the impairment in controlled use of memory (Hertel, 1998); capacity Depression and Memory 67 accounts rarely permit this degree of flexibility. Second, a deficit has been found on the simple task of perceptual identification (Hertel, 1994), and the condition of initial exposure that produced the deficit was the less resource-demanding task: the task of rating curvature, not the task of rating emotionality. Third is evidence that external control can sometimes compensate for deficiencies in less-structured situations, even when the task is resource-intensive (Hertel & Hardin, 1990;Hertel & Rude, 1991a,b).…”

Depression and Problem-Solving Performance on a Fault-Diagnosis Task

“…Current theoretical models suggest a distinction in terms of intact autdtnatic processing and impaired strategic processing, as a result of reduced or diverted cognitive capacity (e.g. Hasher and Zacks, 1979;Ellis and Ashbrook, 1988;Hertel, 1994;Hertel and Hardin, 1990;Hartlage et al, 1993;Teasdale and Barnard, 1993). The automaticstrategic dimension relates to current conceptualizations of attention or working memory as a limited resource information-processing system (e.g.…”