Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The symptomatology of depression includes affective and cognitive features. As such, \ndepression has been associated both with maladaptive concern over emotional material, and \nalso with general impairments in attentional control. In the current thesis, I investigated the \npotential influence of such depression-related dysfunctional emotional processing on a range \nof cognitive control abilities, using experimental paradigms containing either neutral or \naffective stimuli. In contrast to the hypothesis that depressive symptoms are associated with \ngenerally compromised cognitive control, depression-related impairments were not found on \na range of ‘classic' measures of cognitive control, including error-processing (pre-error \nspeeding, posterror slowing and error-related ERPs), overriding response conflict (colour-word Stroop interference, conflict adaptation) or more sustained control processes (cued-RT \nperformance, preparatory ERPs, and maintaining long-term speed-accuracy tradeoffs). \nInterestingly, however, differences between groups with low and elevated levels of depressive \nsymptoms emerged during the performance of emotionally valenced tasks. First, an elevated \ndepressive symptom group showed a reduced ability to resolve emotional conflict arising \nbetween competing affective representations. When compared with spared performance on \nthe classic Stroop task, this result suggests that depressive symptoms are associated with a \nspecific impairment in the ability to regulate emotional distraction. Secondly, an ERP related \nto advanced preparation in cued-RT tasks (the CNV), but not those associated with early \nperceptual processing (P1, N170), was selectively modulated by negative, but not positive, \ntask-irrelevant emotional distractors presented during the cue-target interval. This pattern of \nERP results supports a late processing locus of affective attentional bias in depression. \nTogether, the current results propose that control processes which facilitate the regulation of \nemotional material (i.e. over emotional sources of distraction) might be selectively affected \nby increased depressive symptoms, suggesting that future work should consider affective \nvariables when investigating executive control processes in depression.
Author: Blair Saunders
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1541431632