Negative emotional cues improve free recall of positive and neutral words in unmedicated patients with major depressive disorder.

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibit attentional biases toward negative, mood-congruent stimuli while filtering out positive and neutral stimuli, resulting in memory biases to negative content. While attentional and memory biases in MDD have been extensively studied, the underlying mechanisms of these biases remain unclear. The current study investigates a novel model proposing that exposure to negative emotional cues triggers a transient "attentional window" in individuals with MDD, leading to heightened and deeper cognitive processing of any subsequent information, irrespective of its content. Forty-two unmedicated patients with MDD and no comorbid disorder and 41 healthy controls, completed six blocks of the emotional memory task, in which they were asked to watch a short video (negative, neutral, or positive valence) followed by a memory test on a list of neutral or positive valance words. Results indicated that participants with MDD, but not healthy controls, had better recall performance after a negative video compared to after neutral or positive videos, and that this effect occurred for both neutral and positive word-lists. These findings provide evidence that participants with MDD engage in deeper information processing following exposure to negative emotional stimuli. Potential clinical implications are discussed.

The effect of emotional primes on attentional focus in high versus low depression.

The effect of negative emotional stimuli on attentional focus is unclear. While a number of studies suggest that negative emotional stimuli improve attention, other studies show the opposite effect-namely, that negative emotional stimuli can impair attention and, specifically, attentional focus. It has been suggested that the detrimental effect of negative stimuli on attention is caused by attentional capture and difficulties in disengaging from the stimuli, an effect that is known to be stronger in depressed individuals. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the effect of negative primes on attentional focus as a function of levels of depression. Sixty-seven participants completed the attentional focus task, with either a neutral or a negative emotional prime preceding each trial. Results showed that attentional focus is improved in negative conditions, but that this effect is contingent upon levels of depression: While there is almost no effect of emotion on individuals with low levels of depression, there is a robust effect on individuals with high levels of depression. These results shed light on the process through which individuals with high levels of depression excessively focus on negative information, while simultaneously dismissing neutral information-a crucial part of the vicious cycle of negative mood and depression. Potential clinical implications are discussed.