Reasoning strategies in depression: effects of depressed mood on a syllogism task

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

“…This is consistent with previous evidence of depressive reasoning deficits on abstract tasks (e.g. Channon and Baker, 1994;Baker and Channon, 1995), which require subjects to integrate information from more than one source. These findings are compatible with current models of depression, which postulate impaired strategic processing and intact automatic processing (e.g.…”

“…Gotlib and Asarnow, 1979;Nezu, Nezu and Perri, 1989). There is growing evidence that thinking errors are unlikely to be confined to social problem-solving or to personally salient material, since depression is associated with deficits on abstract reasoning tasks using neutral materials such as syllogistic reasoning (Channon and Baker, 1994) and concept discrimination learning (Baker and Channon, 1995;Silberman, Weingartner and Post, 1983). It is important to investigate the nature of these deficits further, since they have implications both for how depression might affect performance on everyday problem-solving tasks, and for current theories of cognitive functioning in depression.…”

The influence of affect on higher level cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning

“…Given deductive reasoning is highly reliant upon working memory (Copeland & Radvansky, 2004), any reduction as a result of affect would negatively impact upon the primary task. Channon and Baker (1994) provided evidence that the performance of participants in a negative mood was related to problem difficulty, with errors related to the integration of information. Similarly, anxious participants are particularly affected under conditions of high working memory load because anxiety leads to task-irrelevant processing of affective information, which depletes resources available for the primary task (Derakshan & Eysenck, 1998;Richards, French, Keogh, & Carter, 2000).…”

“…Depression produces similar effects. Participants who score higher on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) show impairments in syllogistic reasoning (Channon & Baker, 1994). Thus, a number of studies looking at different affective states of positive and negative valence, sampling different forms of deductive reasoning, show that heightened affect impairs logicality.…”

The effect of emotion on interpretation and logic in a conditional reasoning task

“…For instance, it has been shown that depressed patients perform more poorly than healthy controls on syllogistic reasoning tasks (Channon & Baker, 1994;Radenhausen & Anker, 1988). This is true both under conditions of exacerbated mood (using a negative moodinduction procedure) and baseline mood conditions.…”