Investigating the mediating effect of working memory on intentional forgetting in dysphoria

Abstract

Our aim was to determine if deficits in intentional forgetting that are associated with depression and dysphoria (subclinical depression) could be explained, at least in part, by variations in working memory function. Sixty dysphoric and 61 nondysphoric participants completed a modified version of the think/no-think (TNT) task and a measure of complex working memory (the operation span task). The TNT task involved participants learning a series of emotional cue-target word pairs, before being presented with a subset of the cues and asked to either recall the associated target (think) or to prevent it from coming to mind (no think) by thinking about a substitute target word. Participants were subsequently asked to recall the targets to all cues (regardless of previous recall instructions). As expected, after controlling for anxiety, we found that dysphoric individuals exhibited impaired forgetting relative to the non-dysphoric participants. Also as expected, we found that superior working memory function was associated with more successful forgetting. Critically, in the dysphoric group, we found that working memory mediated the effect of depression on intentional forgetting. That is, depression influenced forgetting indirectly via its effect on working memory. However, under conditions of repeated suppression, there was also a direct effect of depression on forgetting. These findings represent an important development in the understanding of impaired forgetting in depression and also suggest that working memory training might be a viable intervention for improving the ability of depressed individuals to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind.

Examining the stress, depressive thoughts, and working memory capacities of the university students

“…The resulting symptoms of depressive thoughts, as discussed above, lead to the depletion of the knowledge sources of working memory and thus constitute a burden on the working memory because the difficulties facing the discoverer of happiness system in assessing environmental stimuli lead to more rumination of depressive ideas, which leads to further burden on the work of cognitive abilities. This result is consistent with the findings of Noreen et al (2020), Adams et al (2020), and Zhang et al (2018) associating depression with defective elements of working memory and confirm that depressed patients have a problem in controlling the working memory content. This result also agrees with the results of Jopling et al (2020) who show that depression affects the distribution of sources of attention associated with the central executive of working memory, and a study by Yoon et al (2014) showing that patients with depression have problems removing information unrelated to the task from the content of working memory.…”

“…• Reflecting a major improvement in the perception of diminished forgetting in depression and also indicating that instruction in working memory could be a promising intervention to enhance stressed people's capacity to prevent unwelcomed memories from coming to mind as supported by Noreen et al (2020).…”

Memory suppression and its deficiency in psychological disorders: A focused meta-analysis.

“…We conducted our search in PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar (on September 15, 2017) 2 , using combinations of the following Flanker. In addition, we consulted two recent review articles for additional references (Hulbert, Hirschstein, Brontë, & Broughton, 2018;Nørby, 2018), and included two studies that were published after the initial literature search had been completed (Waldhauser et al, 2018;Noreen, Cooke, & Ridout, 2019).…”

Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders

“…Interestingly, when healthy subjects affected by a mild depression (average of BDI-II score was 19.1 ± 0.6; Beck et al, 1996 [ 88 ]) were submitted to a TNT task with neutral words a deficit in suppressing no-think items appeared in these patients. Furthermore, the inability to suppress memory retrieval correlated with the BDI score [ 19 , 93 ]. A mediation analysis revealed that the relationship between the level of depressive symptoms (BDI score) in these subclinical patients and the forgetting rate was fully mediated by working memory capacity [ 93 ].…”

“…Furthermore, the inability to suppress memory retrieval correlated with the BDI score [ 19 , 93 ]. A mediation analysis revealed that the relationship between the level of depressive symptoms (BDI score) in these subclinical patients and the forgetting rate was fully mediated by working memory capacity [ 93 ].…”