Impaired filtering of irrelevant information in depression: an ERP study

Behavioural findings have led to proposals that difficulties in attention and concentration in depression may have their roots in fundamental inhibitory impairments for irrelevant information. These impairments may be associated with reduced capacity to actively maintain relevant information to facilitate goadirected behaviour. In light of mixed data from behavioural studies, the current study using direct neural measurement, examines whether dysphoric individuals show poor filtering of irrelevant information and reduced working memory (WM) capacity for relevant information. Consistent with previous research, a sustained evenrelated potential (ERP) asymmetry, termed contralateral delay activity (CDA), was observed to be sensitive to WM capacity and the efficient filtering of irrelevant information from visual WM. We found a strong positive correlation between the efficiency of filtering irrelevant items and visual WM capacity. Specifically, dysphoric participants were poor at filtering irrelevant information, and showed reduced WM capacity relative to high capacity non-dysphoric participants. Results support the hypothesis that impaired inhibition is a central feature of dysphoria and are discussed within the framework of cognitive and neurophysiological models of depression

Benefits of adaptive cognitive training on cognitive abilities in women treated for primary breast cancer: findings from a 1‐year randomised control trial intervention

Objective: While adaptive cognitive training is beneficial for women with a breast cancer diagnosis, transfer effects of training benefits on perceived and objective measures of cognition are not substantiated. We investigated the transfer effects of online adaptive cognitive training (dual n-back training) on subjective and objective cognitive markers in a longitudinal design. Methods: Women with a primary diagnosis of breast cancer completed 12 sessions of adaptive cognitive training or active control training over 2 weeks. Objective assessments of working memory capacity (WMC), as well as performance on a response inhibition task, were taken while electrophysiological measures were recorded. Self-reported measures of cognitive and emotional health were collected pre-training, post-training, 6-month, and at 1-year follow-up times. Results: Adaptive cognitive training resulted in greater WMC on the Change Detection Task and improved cognitive efficiency on the Flanker task together with improvements in perceived cognitive ability and depression at 1-year post-training. Conclusions: Adaptive cognitive training can improve cognitive abilities with implications for long-term cognitive health in survivorship

The worrying mind in control: An investigation of adaptive working memory training and cognitive bias modification in worry-prone individuals

Worry refers to the experience of uncontrollable negative thoughts. Cognitive models suggest that the combination of negative information processing biases along with diminished attentional control contribute to worry. In the current study we investigate whether promoting a) adaptive interpretation bias and b) efficient deployment of attentional control would influence the tendency to worry. Worry-prone individuals (n = 60) received either active cognitive bias modification for interpretation bias (CBM-I) combined with sham working memory training (WMT), adaptive WMT combined with sham CBM-I, or sham WMT combined with sham CBM-I. Neither of the active training conditions reduced worry during a breathing focus task relative to the control condition. However, when considering inter-individual differences in training-related improvements, we observed a relation between increases in positive interpretation bias and a decrease in negative intrusions. Moreover, increases in working memory performance were related to a reduction in reactivity of negative intrusions to a worry period. Our findings show that facilitating a more benign interpretation bias and improving working memory capacity can have beneficial effects in terms of worry, but also highlight that transfer related gains from existing training procedures can be dependent upon improvement levels on the training task

Using clustering algorithms to examine the association between working memory training trajectories and therapeutic outcomes among psychiatric and healthy populations

Working memory (WM) training has gained interest due to its potential to enhance cognitive functioning and reduce symptoms of mental disorders. Nevertheless, inconsistent results suggest that individual differences may have an impact on training efficacy. This study examined whether individual differences in training performance can predict therapeutic outcomes of WM training, measured as changes in anxiety and depression symptoms in sub-clinical and healthy populations. The study also investigated the association between cognitive abilities at baseline and different training improvement trajectories. Ninety-six participants (50 females, mean age = 27.67, SD = 8.84) were trained using the same WM training task (duration ranged between 7 to 15 sessions). An algorithm was then used to cluster them based on their learning trajectories. We found three main WM training trajectories, which in turn were related to changes in anxiety symptoms following the training. Additionally, executive function abilities at baseline predicted training trajectories. These findings highlight the potential for using clustering algorithms to reveal the benefits of cognitive training to alleviate maladaptive psychological symptoms

The impact of COVID-19 outbreak on emotional and cognitive vulnerability in Iranian women With Breast Cancer

The psychological cost on emotional well-being due to the collateral damage brought about by COVID-19 in accessing oncological services for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment has been documented by recent studies in the United Kingdom. The current study set out to examine the effect of delays to scheduled oncology services on emotional and cognitive vulnerability in women with a breast cancer diagnosis in Iran, one of the very first countries to be heavily impacted by COVID-19. One hundred thirty-nine women with a diagnosis of primary breast cancer answered a series of online questionnaires to assess the current state of rumination, worry, and cognitive vulnerability as well as the emotional impact of COVID-19 on their mental health. Results indicated that delays in accessing oncology services significantly increased COVID related emotional vulnerability. Regression analyses revealed that after controlling for the effects of sociodemographic and clinical variables, women’s COVID related emotional vulnerability explained higher levels of ruminative response and chronic worry as well as poorer cognitive function. This study is the first in Iran to demonstrate that the effects of COVID-19 on emotional health amongst women affected by breast cancer can exaggerate anxiety and depressive related symptoms increasing risks for clinical levels of these disorders. Our findings call for an urgent need to address these risks using targeted interventions exercising resilience

The effects of active worrying on working memory capacity

According to the attentional control theory, worry, a crucial component of anxiety, impairs task performance through its direct effect on working memory capacity (WMC) by using up the limited resources available for performance thus reducing attentional control. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the causal influence of active worrying on WMC in a sample of undergraduate university students (n = 64) assigned either to a worry condition or to a non-worry control condition. Participants performed a change detection task before and after the worry/control manipulation. Mediation analyses showed that the level of self-reported worry mediated the effects of condition on change in WMC as demonstrated by the significant indirect effect of worry and the resulting non-significant direct effect of condition on change in WMC. Similar results were obtained when using state anxiety measures as mediating factors. Results of the current study are amongst the first to demonstrate that worry impairs WMC and as such have important implications for understanding the impact of worry

The association between depressive symptoms and executive control impairments in response to emotional and non-emotional information

Depression has been linked with impaired executive control and specific impairments in inhibition of negative material. To date, only a few studies have examined the relationship between depressive symptoms and executive functions in response to emotional information. Using a new paradigm, the Affective Shift Task (AST), the present study examined whether depressive symptoms in general, and rumination specifically, are related to impairments in inhibition and set shifting in response to emotional and non-emotional material. The main finding was that depressive symptoms in general were not related to inhibition. Set-shifting impairments were only observed in moderate to severely depressed individuals. Interestingly, rumination was related to inhibition impairments, specifically when processing negative information, as well as impaired set shifting as reflected in a larger shift cost. These results are discussed in relation to cognitive views on vulnerability for depression

Can templates-for-rejection suppress real-world affective objects in visual search?

Previous evidence has suggested that feature-based templates-for-rejection can be maintained in working memory to suppress matching features in the environment. Currently, this effect has only been demonstrated using abstract neutral shapes, meaning that it is unclear whether this generalises to real-world images, including aversive stimuli. In the current investigation, participants searched amongst an array of real-world objects for a target, after being pre-cued with either a Distractor template, Target template, or a No template baseline. In Experiment 1, where both Distractor and Target template cues were presented randomly on a trial-by-trial basis, there was moderate evidence of increased capture by aversive distractors after the Distractor template cue. In Experiment 2a, however, when Distractor templates were the only available cue and more time was given to encode the cue features, there was moderate evidence of effective distractor inhibition for real-world aversive and neutral stimuli. In Experiment 2b, when the task required a slower more effortful comparison of target features to stereotypical object representations, there was weaker evidence of inhibition, though there was still modest evidence suggesting effective inhibition of aversive distractors. A Bayesian meta-analysis revealed that across Experiment 2, aversive distractors showed strong cumulative evidence of effective inhibition, but inconsistent inhibition for neutral distractors. The results are interpreted from a rational search behaviour framework, which suggests that individuals utilise informative cues when they enable the most beneficial strategy and are accessible, and apply these to distractors when they cause sufficient disruption, either to search speed or emotional state