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Abstract
Dysphoria is associated with persistence of attention on mood-congruent information. Longer time attending to mood-congruent information for dysphoric individuals (DIs) detracts from goal-relevant information processing and should reduce working memory (WM) capacity. Study 1 showed that DIs and non-DIs have similar WM capacities. Study 2 embedded depressive information into a WM task. Compared to non-DIs, DIs showed significantly reduced WM capacity for goal-relevant information in this task. Study 3 replicated results from Studies 1 and 2, and further showed that DIs had a significantly greater association between processing speed and recall on the depressively modified WM task compared to non-DIs. The presence of inter-task depressive information leads to DI-related decreased WM capacity. Results suggest dysphoria-related WM capacity deficits when depressive thoughts are present. WM capacity deficits in the presence of depressive thoughts are a plausible mechanism to explain day-to-day memory and concentration difficulties associated with depressed mood.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Vamsi Daliparthi, Sara Gamal and Travis Weaver for assistance in data collection and Ehsan Shokri-Kojori for lending his computational expertise.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Friends of Brain Health and the Linda and Joel Roebuck Distinguished New Scientist endowments and the Dianne Cash Fellowship Award (to NAH).