The directed forgetting task: application to emotionally valent material

Alexithymia impairs the cognitive control of negative material while facilitating the recall of neutral material in both younger and older adults

“…Our directed forgetting procedure closely followed that of MacLeod's (1999; see also Power et al, 2000). Our set of 18 words was divided into two halves (nine words each).…”

“…The list method (e.g., MacLeod, 1998MacLeod, , 1999Zellner & Bäuml, 2006) assesses cognitive control either through intentional efforts to remember and forget (see also Bjork, Bjork, & Anderson, 1998) or through efforts to change one's mental context (Sahakyan, Delaney, & Goodmon, 2008;Sahakyan & Foster, 2009;Sahakyan & Kelley, 2002). More specifically, it requires an intentional effort to control what is forgotten and what is remembered: participants must voluntarily not recall TBF items and voluntarily recall the TBR items (Bjork et al, 1998;Power et al, 2000).…”

“…Importantly, it may also help lead to possible treatments for adults having difficulty regulating their emotions. Therefore, to address age effects in alexithymia and cognitive control, we used the directed forgetting paradigm with younger and older adults (see, e.g., MacLeod, 1998MacLeod, , 1999Power, Dalgleish, Claudio, Tata, & Kentish, 2000).…”

Brief Online Self-help Exercises for Postnatal Women to Improve Mood: A Pilot Study

“…It comprises two 7-item scales, one for depression and one for anxiety, each of which is scored from 0 to 21. Established cut-offs are 8-10 for mild symptoms, [11][12][13][14] for moderate symptoms, and 15 or more for severe symptoms. Internal reliability in our sample was high (α = .89 and α = .85 respectively).…”

“…Thought content and mood are inter-related [9] , and depression [10] is associated with negative automatic thoughts, negative beliefs about oneself and others, and memory biases [11] . This pattern is seen in postnatal women with symptoms of depression [8] .…”