Positive effects of subclinical depression in prospective memory and ongoing tasks in young and old adults

Abstract

Results reported in the literature show that depression can have either negative or neutral effects on prospective memory (PM). The goal of the present study was to broaden the analysis of depression-related effects on PM, with regard to the possibility that subclinical depression may have positive influence on PM. A total of 120 participants from four groups (young/old, subclinically depressed/non-depressed) completed event- and time-based PM tasks embedded in the linear orders task or stories task, respectively. In the event-based PM task no effects of depression were found, whereas depressed participants were more accurate in the time-based PM task, where higher monitoring during the last minute of the task was observed. It was also found that depressed participants built a mental model in the linear orders task more accurately than controls. Results of the present study are discussed with reference to the analytical rumination hypothesis.

Event-based prospective memory deficits in individuals with high depressive symptomatology: Problems controlling attentional resources?

“…Taken together, these findings suggest that under OI conditions, HDS participants could allocate attentional resources to PM tasks as effectively as LDS participants. These findings are consistent with some previous studies reporting no effect of depression on resource-demanding PM tasks (Albiński et al, 2012;Altgassen et al, 2011) and our earlier finding that was based on the same participants as those that were used in the present study (Li et al, 2013)-that that there were no depression-related event-based PM deficits when using the MIST.…”

“…Of the remaining 16%, eight participants with elevated depression screening scores had subsequent scores in the minimal range (HDS to LDS), and two participants with originally minimal symptoms reported elevated symptoms on the second testing (LDS to HDS). BDI-II scores in our HDS cohort (M HDS = 25.75, SD = 9.98; M LDS = 7.72, SD = 3.32) were substantially elevated and similar or greater than the mean BDI-II scores reported in previous studies (Altgassen et al, 2009(Altgassen et al, , 2011Albiński et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2013;Rude et al, 1999). As this was part of a larger study undertaken to investigate the effects of depressive symptomatology, note that the participants in this study were also used in another study using the MIST PM measure (Li et al, 2013).…”

“…Also consistent with a specific depression-related deficit in attentional allocation to PM tasks, Albiński et al (2012) found that HDS did not result in PM deficits when targets were highly salient (i.e., presented in a different color than nontargets). Furthermore, another study evaluating time-based PM (Rude et al, 1999) has found that individuals with depression checked the experimental clock less frequently and failed to remember to perform the time-based PM task as often as nondepressed individuals.…”

“…Three studies examining resource-demanding PM tasks in depression have produced results inconsistent with those reviewed above. Albiński et al (2012) reported better time-based PM in mildly depressed than in nondepressed participants. Li et al's (2013) findings (which were based on the same participants as those that were used in the present study) demonstrated no event-based PM deficit for HDS participants compared to LDS participants on the MIST.…”

Patterns of Prospective Memory Impairment Among Individuals with Depression: The Influence of Cue Type and Delay Interval

“…When participants are required to make a PM response to an event embedded in an ongoing task (event-based PM task), one study reported PM impairments as a function of depression (Altgassen et al, 2009), but two others did not (Albiński et al, 2012;Altgassen, Henry, Bürgler, & Kliegel, 2011). To our knowledge, no study has directly compared whether the magnitude of PM deficits associated with depression varies as a function of cue type in a single standardized clinically relevant PM measure.…”