Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with mood-congruent processing biases towards negative information in working memory (WM), which is considered as the core manifest of cognitive vulnerability of MDD. This review provides an overview of the biased processing of emotional information of depression in three executive components of WM (i.e., updating, inhibition, and shifting). Patients with MDD are slower in updating negative contents in WM and have difficulties in disengaging from task-irrelevant negative information within WM. Neuroimaging studies show that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) are hyperactivated in patient with MDD relative to healthy controls. Moreover, patients with MDD perform poorer than healthy controls in updating positive contents in WM and they have smaller occipital P1 in response to positive materials, which indicates an insensitivity to positive items on early encoding stage of WM updating in depression, thus depression is associated with negative enhancement and positive attenuation in updating emotional contents in WM. In regards to inhibition, patients with MDD are found to exhibit impairments in suppressing irrelevant negative information and cannot effectively prevent the irrelevant negative information entering WM during inhibition. These impairments in inhibition have been suggested to be associated with altered brain activations of the dlPFC and ACC. Relative to healthy controls, patients with MDD show decreased activation of the dlPFC and increased activation of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Abnormal functional connectivity within the frontoparietal network has also been suggested to underlie deficits in cognitive control of depression. The findings of emotion-specific dysfunctions of shifting function in depression are inconsistent, which might be related to emotional valence of task materials and confounded by other symptoms, such as rumination. The current review of biased processing of emotional information of depression in WM provides a new perspective for understanding cognitive bias of depression, which helps unravel the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie the cognitive information processing of emotional contents within WM of depression. Importantly, this review also offers important clues for future research on vulnerability factors implicated in the onset and maintenance of depression and expands our understanding of cognitive models of depression from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Based upon this literature review, we therefore have identified some open questions and future research directions in this important research area. Firstly, additional research is needed to investigate the unity and diversity of the biased processing in three WM components, and assess their distinctive contribution to depressive symptoms, as well as the mediating effect of other cognitive biases (attention, memory and interpretation biases) and emotion regulation strategies on this association. It is worth noting that the combined cognitive bias hypothesis has been proposed to formulate the interactions among cognitive biases in depression. This hypothesis is arguing that cognitive biases do not operate in isolation, but are interdependent and work together to influence symptoms of depression. Secondly, future research is needed to examine dysfunctions of WM bias across divergent samples (the at-risk sample, the current MDD, the remitted MDD) to uncover the impact of biased processing in different stages of MDD. Thirdly, the induction effects of different emotional materials (affective words, emotional face, or emotional pictorial materials) on biased processing should be explored in future studies. Moreover, unraveling the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the process of emotional materials in WM could help resolve the inconsistency of previous findings. Finally, by examining the effect of WM training on reducing WM bias and depressive symptoms, future research could provide direct evidence for the causal relationship between cognitive bias and depression and benefit future development of cognitive bias modification interventions for biased processing in WM of depression.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Age-related positivity effects refer to the phenomenon that older adults display a preference for positive rather than negative information in cognitive processing. Previous studies using neutral materials have found that WM performance declines with aging. In recent years, empirical and theoretical research have begun to explore the effect of emotional valence on WM performance in the elderly and have revealed an interaction between emotional valance and task-relevance on positivity effects. Positivity effects has been observed in WM studies with emotional valence acting as a kind of task-relevant information. For instance, older people have enhanced performance in WM tasks with positive emotional stimuli, and decreased performance on negative emotional stimuli. In contrast, less attention has focused on the area of emotional valence as task-irrelevant information in WM and conflicting findings also have been reported. Some studies have found that the presence of negative irrelevant emotional stimuli reduces WM performance of older adults, while other studies have found that positive distractors have greater interference on WM of older adults. These remind that both emotional valence and task relevance are critical components in the processing of positivity effects in WM. Preliminary neuroimaging studies have revealed age-related functional changes in the dorsal executive system (including the middle frontal gyrus and the parietal cortex) and ventral affective system (including the left inferior frontal cortex and the amygdala). The middle frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus are both involved in inhibiting task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in WM and are less activated in older adults than in young adults. More specifically, the middle frontal gyrus is involved in the selection of task-relevant information, while the inferior frontal gyrus plays an important role in resolving interference from emotional distractors within WM. The amygdala, which is deactivated among older adults, is activated in young adults during the processing of negative stimuli. The socioemotional selectivity theory and the dual-competition model have been found to mainly account for age-related positivity effects in WM. The socioemotional selectivity theory, a theory of emotional-motivational life-span development, explains positivity effects from future time perspective, the review of WM studies on age difference with emotional valence as task-relevant information provides empirical support for the socioemotional selectivity theory. The dual competition model emphasizes the influence of task-relevance of emotional materials on WM processing and holds that the difference on cognitive resources required by emotional information as task-relevant stimuli or task-irrelevant stimuli is the key factor that affects WM performance. It has been found that task-relevant emotional materials promote WM performance in older adults, and task-irrelevant emotional contents impair their WM performance, thus the current review of task relevance on WM performance in older adults is consistent with hypothesis of the dual competition model. The dynamic integration theory explains positivity effects from the perspective of cognitive decline. From this perspective greater differences would be observed between young adults and older adults with cognitive impairments, such as Alzheimer's disease patients, but there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the dynamic integration theory. Overall, future studies are warranted to explore the characteristics of emotional processing in different stages of WM in older adults. The event-related potential technique, which has been used to provide time-sensitive assessment of positivity effects in attention, holds great potentials in the study of time course of positivity effects in WM. The potential influences of internal encoding processes of emotional materials (affective words, emotional face, and emotional pictorial materials) on the mechanism of positivity effects in WM should be clarified in future studies. More psychophysiological and neuroimaging studies are needed to uncover the important neural circuits related to the impact of task-relevance of emotion on positivity effects. Finally, the underlying mechanisms and potential benefits of emotional WM training on the improvement of cognitive functions and emotional experience in the elderly should be investigated.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2020-11-22
Abstract： Age-related positivity effect refers to the phenomenon that older adults display a preference for positive rather than negative information in cognitive processing. Recent researches in working memory (WM) have found the effect of the interaction between emotional valance and task-relevance on positivity effect. Positivity effect has been observed in WM studies with emotional valence acting as a kind of task-relevant information. For instance, older people have enhanced performance in WM tasks with positive emotional stimuli, and decreased performance on negative emotional stimuli. In contrast, less attention has focused on the area of emotional valence as task-irrelevant information in WM and conflicting findings also have been reported. These remind that both emotional valence and task relevance are critical components in the processing of positivity effect in WM. Preliminary neuroimaging studies have revealed that the associations between age-related functional changes in the dorsal executive system and ventral affective system and the age effect in emotional process of WM. The socioemotional selectivity theory and the dual-competition model have been found to mainly account for age-related positivity effect in WM. But there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the dynamic integration theory. Overall, future studies are warranted in exploring the characteristics of emotional processing in different stages of WM in older adults, clarifying the potential influences of internal encoding processes of emotional materials on the mechanism of positivity effect, uncovering the important neural circuits related to the impact of task-relevance of emotion on positivity effect, as well as revealing the underlying mechanisms and potential benefits of emotional WM training on the improvement of cognitive functions and emotional experience in the elderly.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-10-19
Abstract： Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with mood-congruent processing biases towards negative information in working memory (WM), which is considered as the core manifest of cognitive vulnerability of MDD. This review provides an overview of the biased processing of emotional information of depression in three executive components of WM. Patients with MDD have difficulties in disengaging from negative information and present insufficient processing of positive materials during WM updating. MDD patients also exhibit impairments in suppressing irrelevant negative information and cannot effectively prevent the irrelevant negative information entering WM during inhibition. The findings of emotion-specific dysfunctions of shifting function in depression are inconsistent. Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies suggest that the biased processing in WM is associated with altered brain activations in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. Future research is needed to investigate the different contribution of each type of biased processing to depressive symptoms, the unity of the biased processing in three WM components, the impact of biased processing in different stages of MDD, and the induction effects of different emotional materials on biased processing. Moreover, unraveling the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the process of emotional materials in WM could help resolve the inconsistency of previous findings and benefit future development of cognitive bias modification interventions for biased processing in WM of depression.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
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