Rumination moderates the longitudinal associations of awareness of age-related change with depressive and anxiety symptoms.

OBJECTIVE: Lower awareness of age-related gains (AARC-gains) and higher awareness of age-related losses (AARC-losses) may be risk factors for depressive and anxiety symptoms. We explored whether: (1) Baseline AARC-gains and AARC-losses predict depressive and anxiety symptoms at one-year follow-up; (2) age and rumination moderate these associations; (3) levels of AARC-gains and AARC-losses differ among individuals with different combinations of current and past depression and/or with different combinations of current and past anxiety. METHODS: In this one-year longitudinal cohort study participants (N = 3386; mean age = 66.0; SD = 6.93) completed measures of AARC-gains, AARC-losses, rumination, depression, anxiety, and lifetime diagnosis of depression and anxiety in 2019 and 2020. Regression models with tests of interaction were used. RESULTS: Higher AARC-losses, but not lower AARC-gains, predicted more depressive and anxiety symptoms. Age did not moderate these associations. Associations of lower AARC-gains and higher AARC-losses with more depressive symptoms and of higher AARC-losses with more anxiety symptoms were stronger in those with higher rumination. Individuals with both current and past depression reported highest AARC-losses and lowest AARC-gains. Those with current, but not past anxiety, reported highest AARC-losses. CONCLUSION: Perceiving many age-related losses may place individuals at risk of depressive and anxiety symptoms, especially those who frequently ruminate.

Neural correlates of social exchanges during the Prisoner's Dilemma game in depression.

BACKGROUND: Depression is a disabling disorder that significantly impacts on the interpersonal functioning of individuals. However, little is known about the neural substrates of such difficulties. In the last few years neuroeconomics, which combines imaging with multiplayer behavioural economic paradigms, has been used to study the neural substrates of normal and abnormal interpersonal interactions. METHOD: This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural activity in unmedicated depressed participants (n = 25) and matched healthy controls (n = 25). During scanning, participants played a behavioural economic game, the Prisoner's Dilemma. In this game, the participant and a co-player independently choose either to cooperate or not cooperate with each other. RESULTS: Depressed participants reported higher levels of negative feelings (betrayal, guilt) during the game than did controls. Neural activation was compared between 'imbalanced' events [when one of the players cooperated and the other defected ('CD' and 'DC')] and 'draw' events [when both players either cooperated or defected ('CC' and 'DD')]. Participants preferentially activated the anterior insula and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a region implicated in cognitive control and regulation of emotions. Importantly, compared to controls depressed participants showed reduced activation in the left DLPFC, with the extent of signal reduction correlating with increased self-report feelings of guilt associated with DC outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that depression is associated with reduced activation of the DLPFC during social events that involve unreciprocated cooperation. This abnormality may underlie anomalies in cognitive control and top-down regulation of emotions during challenging social exchanges.

Abnormal brain responses to social fairness in depression: an fMRI study using the Ultimatum Game.

BACKGROUND: Depression is a prevalent disorder that significantly affects the social functioning and interpersonal relationships of individuals. This highlights the need for investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying these social difficulties. Investigation of social exchanges has traditionally been challenging as such interactions are difficult to quantify. Recently, however, neuroeconomic approaches that combine multiplayer behavioural economic paradigms and neuroimaging have provided a framework to operationalize and quantify the study of social interactions and the associated neural substrates. METHOD: We investigated brain activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in unmedicated depressed participants (n = 25) and matched healthy controls (n = 25). During scanning, participants played a behavioural economic paradigm, the Ultimatum Game (UG). In this task, participants accept or reject monetary offers from other players. RESULTS: In comparison to controls, depressed participants reported decreased levels of happiness in response to 'fair' offers. With increasing fairness of offers, controls activated the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal caudate, regions that have been reported to process social information and responses to rewards. By contrast, participants with depression failed to activate these regions with increasing fairness, with the lack of nucleus accumbens activation correlating with increased anhedonia symptoms. Depressed participants also showed a diminished response to increasing unfairness of offers in the medial occipital lobe. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that depressed individuals differ from healthy controls in the neural substrates involved with processing social information. In depression, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal caudate may underlie abnormalities in processing information linked to the fairness and rewarding aspects of other people's decisions.

The effects of thought suppression on autobiographical memory recall.

While it is well documented that autobiographical memory (ABM) recall is affected in Posttraumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD), less is known about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this pattern. This paper presents two research studies which investigated the role of thought suppression in the recall of ABMs. Study 1 assessed the role of thought suppression as a correlate of ABM retrieval in an undergraduate student sample (n=50). The results showed that higher levels of trait thought suppression were significantly correlated with faster recall of negative episodic memories as well as reduced recall of personal semantic memories. Thought suppression remained as a significant predictor of ABM recall, even when the participants' levels of depression and post-traumatic stress reactions were considered. Study 2 investigated the causal effects of thought suppression on ABM recall. 64 undergraduate students were shown a negative video clip and were asked either to suppress any thought of the video or simply to monitor their thoughts immediately thereafter. Results showed that suppression directly led to significantly enhanced negative episodic ABM recall, as well as a significantly reduced ability to recall personal semantic memories.

Changes in the relationship between self-reference and emotional valence as a function of dysphoria.

The self-positivity bias is found to be an aspect of normal cognitive function. Changes in this bias are usually associated with changes in emotional states, such as dysphoria or depression. The aim of the present study was to clarify the role of emotional valence within self-referential processing. By asking non-dysphoric and dysphoric individuals to rate separately the emotional and self-referential content of a set of 240 words, it was possible to identify the differences in the relationship between self-reference and emotional valence, which are associated with dysphoria. The results support the existence of the self-positivity bias in non-dysphoric individuals. More interestingly, dysphoric individuals were able to accurately identify the emotional content of the word stimuli. They failed, however, to associate this emotional valence with self-reference. These findings are discussed in terms of attributional self-biases and their consequences for cognition.

Seeing yourself in a positive light: brain correlates of the self-positivity bias.

Individuals are found to have better recall for self-referent information than other types of information. However, attribution research has shown that self-reference is highly correlated with emotional valence. The present study attempted to identify and separate the processing of self-reference and emotional valence using ERPs. Participants performed a two-choice task, judging the self-referential content of positive and negative words. Reaction times revealed an interaction between self-reference and emotional valence. Faster responses occurred after self-positive and non-self negative words as compared to self-negative and non-self-positive words. A similar interaction was identified in ERP waveforms in the time range of the N400 component at fronto-central electrode sites, with larger N400 amplitudes for words outwith the self-positivity bias. Thus, the size of the N400 may indicate the extent to which information is discrepant with the individual's self-concept.

Theory driven rehabilitation of executive functioning: improving planning skills in people with traumatic brain injury through the use of an autobiographical episodic memory cueing procedure.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) frequently leads to the development of a 'dysexecutive syndrome'. The associated difficulties with problem solving (including specific impairments in planning, initiation/plan-implementation and self-monitoring) represent a major challenge to functional recovery and adaptation following brain injury and serve as an important target for rehabilitation. Previous research suggests that one reason people with TBI are poor at everyday planning is that they fail to spontaneously use specific autobiographical memories to support planning in unstructured situations. In this study, we examined whether a self-instructional technique involving self-cueing to recall specific autobiographical experiences would improve performance on a planning task. Two groups of 15 participants who had suffered a closed traumatic brain injury carried out the Everyday Descriptions Task (Dritschel, B. (1991). The role of autobiographical memory in describing how to perform everyday activities. In Paper presented at the European Cognitive Society Conference.), in which they were asked to describe how they would plan eight common unstructured activities, i.e. activities that could be solved in a variety of ways. Group 1 was then asked to describe how to plan a second set of eight unstructured activities. Prior to completing their second set of eight activities, Group 2 underwent training in a procedure aimed at prompting the retrieval of specific memories to support planning. The results suggested that the intervention was effective at increasing the number of specific memories recalled, with a corresponding increase in the effectiveness of the plan and number of relevant steps in the plan. Potential applications of the technique are discussed.

The effect of burn injury on adolescents autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical memory recall was investigated in two female adolescent groups; one group who had experienced a burn injury and a matched control group. The Burn group was not currently depressed or anxious, but scored significantly higher on the intrusion subscale of the impact of event scale compared to controls. Two autobiographical memory tasks, the autobiographical memory cueing task and the Children's Autobiographical Memory Inventory (CAMI), were used. For the cueing task, the Burn group was significantly slower to recall specific memories. This group also recalled significantly fewer specific memories and significantly more extended overgeneral memories. For the CAMI, the burns group produced significantly lower semantic and episodic recall. The Burn group also produced significant correlations between sub-scales of the impact of event scale and selected measures on the autobiographical memory tasks. Higher intrusion scores were associated with less detailed episodic recall. Higher avoidance scores were associated with longer latencies to recall memories to negative cue words and fewer specific memories to all cue words. These results are discussed from the perspective that the Burn group experienced intrusive thoughts which interfered with normal autobiographical functioning.

The temporal resolution of neural codes: does response latency have a unique role?

This article reviews the nature of the neural code in non-human primate cortex and assesses the potential for neurons to carry two or more signals simultaneously. Neurophysiological recordings from visual and motor systems indicate that the evidence for a role for precisely timed spikes relative to other spike times (ca. 1-10 ms resolution) is inconclusive. This indicates that the visual system does not carry a signal that identifies whether the responses were elicited when the stimulus was attended or not. Simulations show that the absence of such a signal reduces, but does not eliminate, the increased discrimination between stimuli that are attended compared with when the stimuli are unattended. The increased accuracy asymptotes with increased gain control, indicating limited benefit from increasing attention. The absence of a signal identifying the attentional state under which stimuli were viewed can produce the greatest discrimination between attended and unattended stimuli. Furthermore, the greatest reduction in discrimination errors occurs for a limited range of gain control, again indicating that attention effects are limited. By contrast to precisely timed patterns of spikes where the timing is relative to other spikes, response latency provides a fine temporal resolution signal (ca. 10 ms resolution) that carries information that is unavailable from coarse temporal response measures. Changes in response latency and changes in response magnitude can give rise to different predictions for the patterns of reaction times. The predictions are verified, and it is shown that the standard method for distinguishing executive and slave processes is only valid if the representations of interest, as evidenced by the neural code, are known. Overall, the data indicate that the signalling evident in neural signals is restricted to the spike count and the precise times of spikes relative to stimulus onset (response latency). These coding issues have implications for our understanding of cognitive models of attention and the roles of executive and slave systems.

The effects of specific retrieval instruction on social problem-solving in depression.

OBJECTIVES: We examine the proposal that social problem-solving in depression may be improved with the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories. DESIGN AND METHODS: Social problem-solving was assessed with the Means-End Problem-Solving task (MEPS; Platt & Spivack, 1975a). Depressed and non-depressed participants were required either to retrieve a specific memory prior to generating a MEPS solution (primed condition) or to report on the memories retrieved during MEPS performance after giving their MEPS solution (non-primed condition). Participants also judged whether the memories retrieved had been helpful or unhelpful for the process of solution generation. RESULTS: In both depressed and non-depressed individuals, priming increased specific memory retrieval but did not improve MEPS performance. An interaction between depression and priming revealed that priming increased the retrieval of helpful memories in the depressed sample. CONCLUSIONS: Specificity is not, in itself, a sufficient retrieval aim for successful social problem-solving. However specific memory priming may be beneficial in depression because it facilitates the recognition of memories which are helpful for problem-solving.

Gender differences in the dual-task effects on autobiographical memory retrieval during social problem solving.

A dual-task paradigm was used to explore the effects of cognitive load on social problem solving and autobiographical memory retrieval. The role that gender may play in mediating the relationship was also examined. Participants performed a secondary task concurrently with two primary tasks: (a) a cueing task, and (b) the Means-End Problem-Solving (MEPS) Task, during which they were required to attend to the memories retrieved during solution generation. Two dual-task conditions were employed in order that two levels of secondary task difficulty could be explored. Level of difficulty proved to be an important factor in the effects of resource reduction on the two primary tasks. Retrieval during the MEPS was effected by both the easy and difficult secondary task whereas retrieval on the cueing task was affected by the difficult task only. The results also showed that females (in contrast to males) favoured a more detailed SPS style using a specific memory database. Consequently, under central executive pressure, females' performance was significantly affected while males' performance remained largely unchanged.

Everyday planning difficulties following traumatic brain injury: a role for autobiographical memory.

The present study examines the role of autobiographical memory in describing how to perform both open-ended and closed everyday activities in 12 patients suffering traumatic brain injury and 12 aged-matched controls. The frequency (high versus low) of performing the activities was also manipulated. Patients seemed less well able to benefit from using specific autobiographical memories; they reported using significantly fewer specific autobiographical memories for describing how to perform low-frequency activities and significantly more such memories for high-frequency activities compared with controls. The quality of their descriptions was also significantly poorer for the open-ended activities. Finally, significant correlations were found between the quality of the descriptions and the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories for the controls only. The importance of the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories for everyday problem-solving is discussed.

Social problem solving and autobiographical memory in non-clinical depression.

OBJECTIVES: We examine the proposal that specific autobiographical memories may play a major role in successful social problem solving (SPS). DESIGN AND METHODS: Depressed and control students report on the types of memories they retrieve while performing an SPS task and a cueing task. RESULTS: The retrieval of specific memories on the cueing task and during SPS was found to be positively related to SPS skill. CONCLUSIONS: Specific memories are important for successful SPS. However, the relationship between a specific memory deficit and poor SPS is mediated by severity of depression.

Role of autobiographical memory in social problem solving and depression.

Depressed patients frequently exhibit deficiencies in social problem solving (SPS). A possible cause of this deficit is an impairment in patients' ability to retrieve specific autobiographical memories. A clinically depressed group and a hospital control group performed the Means-End Problem-Solving (MEPS; J. J. Platt & G. Spivack, 1975a) task, during which they were required to attend to the memories retrieved during solution generation. Memories were categorized according to whether they were specific, categoric, or extended and whether the valence of the memories was positive or negative. Results support the general hypothesis that SPS skill is a function of autobiographical memory retrieval as measured by a cuing task and by the types of memories retrieved during the MEPS. However, the dysfunctional nature of categoric memories in SPS, rather than the importance of specific memories, was highlighted in the depressed group. Valence proved to be an unimportant variable in SPS ability. The cyclical links among autobiographical memory retrieval, SPS skills, and depression are discussed.

Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources.

Stimulus-independent thoughts (SITs) are streams of thoughts and images unrelated to immediate sensory input. Four experiments examined the contribution of aspects of working memory to production of SITs. In Experiments 1 and 2, interventions that were targeted on, respectively, phonological and visuospatial components of working memory both interfered with production of SITs, but there was evidence that these tasks also made demands on central executive resources. Experiments 3 and 4 specifically examined the hypothesis that production of SITs and control of nonproceduralized tasks both depend on central executive resources, and so should show mutual interference. In Experiment 3, prior practice on pursuit rotor and memory tasks reduced the interference with SITs from concurrent task performance. In Experiment 4, randomness within a task involving random-number generation was less when SITs were being produced concurrently than it was when they were not. The results suggest that production of SITs depends on central executive resources.

A problematic counter-regulation experiment: implications for the link between dietary restraint and overeating.

The current study failed to find any evidence of laboratory counter-regulation amongst restrained eaters given a preload, regardless of the measures of dietary restraint used to classify subjects, including dieting status on the day of the study. Furthermore, there was no evidence to suggest that high restrainers characteristically overeat or experience a sense of loss of control over eating in naturalistic settings. These findings indicate that the link between dietary restraint and overeating or bulimic episodes is, at most, a weak one. Future investigations must incorporate more detailed and sensitive measures of both restraint and overeating if analogue studies are to be useful for understanding the process involved in clinically significant episodes of overeating or binge eating.

Autobiographical fluency: a method for the study of personal memory.

Fifty-five subjects recalled autobiographical episodes or personal facts such as names of friends and teachers, from different lifetime periods. In each case, subjects were given 90 sec in which to retrieve as many items as possible. Also tested was subjects' fluency in generating items from semantic categories (animals, vegetables, British prime ministers, and U.S. presidents). Results of cluster analysis on the fluency tasks showed a dissociation between subjects' ability to retrieve personal episodes, personal semantic information, and nonpersonal semantic information. The dissociations observed in the fluency tasks are interpreted in terms of the different retrieval strategies required for the different types of information sought.

Individual differences in affect-related cognitive operations elicited by experimental stimuli.

Beck's cognitive model of depression suggests the importance of cognitive distortions, such as overgeneralization and personalization, in the aetiology of depression. Larsen, Diener & Cropanzano (1987) developed a method for directly measuring the cognitive operations of overgeneralization and personalization in the reactions of normal subjects to experimentally presented visual stimuli. The present study employed this method to examine the relationship between use of these cognitive operations and the personality dimensions of affect intensity, neuroticism and extraversion. Results showed that high scorers on affect intensity exhibited more evidence of overgeneralization and personalization, replicating Larsen et al.'s (1987) findings, with a similar effect for neuroticism. The results suggest that the persistent differences in response to emotional events measured by the traits of affect intensity and neuroticism may be mediated by particular styles of cognitive processing.

The role of female occupation in severity of alcohol-related problems.

This study investigated whether occupational class is related to the severity of problems associated with alcohol abuse in females. Sixty-six female alcoholic inpatients at a private psychiatric hospital were studied. Of these women, 31 were workers (working at the time of admission), 18 were unemployed workers (unemployed at admission but had worked most of their adult lives), and the remaining 17 were homemakers. Problem severity was assessed for 66 alcoholic women using the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), a standardized clinical interview. A questionnaire assessing the degree of occupational stress experienced was also administered. Employment problem severity ratings from the ASI differed significantly across the three occupation subgroups [F(2,63) = 10.99, p less than .05]; the unemployed workers reported more severe employment problems than did either the workers [t(63) = 3.07, p less than .05] or homemakers [t(63) = 4.77, p less than .05]. There were no significant differences between the three groups on the other five ASI dimensions. A cluster analysis on ASI severity ratings revealed a trend for workers to have family and psychological problems in addition to alcoholism. This seems not to have had an impact on wanting a job change; significantly more homemakers (z = 4.77, p less than .05) and unemployed workers (z = 4.56, p less than .05) than workers wanted a job change.