Аннотация:Background and Aims: Depression is an important negative condition and may significantly affect the life of people. As depression has a significant cognitive component, a specific focus on the cognitive mechanisms of depression is warranted (Snyder, 2013). We replicated the study of De Lissnyder et al. (2012) to check whether there is an association between the sensitivity to negative emotional interference in working memory and depression level in a non-clinical sample.
Methods: N = 60 (44 female, mean age 27±7 years). The participants completed a Russian version of Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) with scores ranging from 0 to 26 (M = 7.5, SD = 6.6) and performed the Internal Shift Task. To assess the effects of sub-clinical depression, we median-splitted (Me = 5.5) the sample giving a euphoric and a non-euphoric group.
Results: We found a Group × Valence interaction, F (1, 58) = 4.48, p < 0.05, confirming the result of the previous analyses – the euphoric group was characterized by reduced RTs during the processing of angry faces.
Conclusions: We found typical effects of stimuli emotionality (emotional materials being processed more slowly) and switching (the change of a stimulus category leading to slower processing). More importantly, we found no signs that presenting a negative stimulus in the previous probe selectively impairs processing in the subsequent probe in subjects with more depressive symptoms. However, we found that non-dysphoric subjects exhibit a protective bias away from negative information processing the negative stimuli more quickly than neutral stimuli.