Depression, Emotional Words In Patients With Working Memory And Its Side Of The Exception Of A Preliminary Study

.Background I Generally speaking, the depressive patients show depressive emotion. Many previous researches suggested they suffered from worse memory. Recently, researchers have focused on the effect of the executive dysfunction on worse memory in depressive patients, such as measuring the deficit of working memory and the cerebral impairment linking with the working memory for the depressive disorders. Using MRI and PET, researchers indicated that the depression had suffered from the prefrontal dysfunction. It suggested that the working memory was impaired in the depressive patients. Moreover, the researchers who aimed to test the processing resources of working memory using ERPs in depressed and nondepressed individuals reported that ERPs was affected in different ways for the two groups. Because they ignored the influence of emotion, the deficit of working memory in depressive patients could not be uncovered in the behavioural results. Furthermore, studies using fMRI and PET showed that left prefrontal volume reduced and resting blood and metabolism of left prefrontal lobe in depressive patients had typically more reduced than the right. These evidences provided the fact that the depressive patients could exist abnormal cerebral functional lateralization. So this study used emotional and neutral words to examine the working memory function in depressive patients and proposed that cerebral functional lateralization of emotional working memory was abnormal in depressive patients.Methods: We compared behavioural performance during processing of the 1-back workingmemory task in 24 depressed patients and 24 healthy matched control subjects. The stimuli were emotional and neutral words using a method of presentation to each visual half-field in which perception of each item was nearly perfect thereby allowing laterality differences for effects of working memory.Result: (1) There were more the errors and longer correct reaction time (CRT) in processing working memory for the patients than for the normal subjects. (2) The CRT of processing emotional words was longer and the errors were much more than the neutral words. Positive words had longer CRT and more errors in the left visual field (LVF) for both participants. (3) The processing of working memory of emotional and neutral words had longer CRT and more errors in the LVF for the normal subject. And the negative and neutral words had the same result for the patients. But positive words had longer CRT and more errors in the right visual field (RVF).! (1) Depressed patients had great deficit in words working memory. (2) The processing of emotional words was more difficult than the neutral words. Emotional words had more significant load to execute working memory than the neutral words. (3) The words working memory had advantage in the left hemisphere (LH) for the controls. But the patients had the same mode in processing negative and neutral words. The positive words were advantage in the right hemisphere (RH). There could be exited abnormal in the cerebral functional lateraUzation with positive words. (4) The processing of negative words was better than the positive. The positive emotion was executed in the LF and the negative emotion in the RH, which was depended on the valence hypothesis. The processing in the same hemisphere competed the processing resource for the emotion with words.