ИСТИНА

Introduction. Depression is a common psychiatric disorder which makes important the study of its psychological mechanisms. A possible factor in the development of depression may be decreased efficiency of processing of negative working memory representations. Objectives. To compare the efficiency of emotional working memory representations processing in patients with depression and healthy controls. Methods. Patients with depressive spectrum disorders (N=29, 20 females, mean age 49 years) and healthy controls (21 females, mean age 32 years) were studied. The subjects performed a self-paced working memory counting task with face stimuli. The task was either neutral (counting male/female faces) or emotional (counting happy/angry faces). Response times indicative of working memory counters’ updating efficiency were recorded with E-Prime 2.0 software and analyzed via a repeated-measures ANOVA and Student’s t-criterion. Results. There was a tendency for less efficient processing of angry faces in depression (p<0.05). This slowing of negative stimuli processing in depression was observed in the emotional task condition only (p<0.05). This slowing was specifically driven by a slowing in the processing of angry faces following a now irrelevant angry face (t=2.01, p<0.5). That is, in depression the presentation of an angry stimulus in a previous probe negatively affects the processing of angry stimulus in the next probe. In controls the repetition of stimulus’ valence leads to a speeded processing of the second stimulus (t=2.54, p<0.01). Conclusions. Depression is associated with less efficient processing of negatively valenced representations in working memory and, specifically, with less efficient suppression of irrelevant negative working memory representations.