The Directed Forgetting Of Emotional Faces In Depression

Objective The main purpose of this article is to explore the directed forgetting(DF) characteristic in depressed patients and the mechanisms of DF in depression, then to invoke more about the relation between the function of DF and the cognitive prejudice in depressed patients.Methods The current study employed item-method DF paradigm designed to invoke the difference between health and the depression in forgetting and the cognitive characteristic in depression. The participants were 35 depressed patients who were diagnosed by a psychiatrist according to the ICD-10 criteria and 33 health people. The experiment materials are emotional faces from the CFAPS, ANOVA analysis was used to analyze the difference of the directed forgetting between the two groups.Results There was a significantly differences in Project type and group(all P < 0.05), the item type and group interaction effect close to statistical significance(P=0.086), the item type and emotional interaction effect were statistically significant(P<0.001).Separate analysis showed that, the two groups’ DF effect is different, the control recognized more TBR than TBF [(10.1±2.3) vs.(8.7±2.2), P< 0.01], but there was no significant difference in TBR and TBF’ recognition in the depression group [(8.00±2.74) vs.(7.7 ±2.9), P = 0.403].Depression group recognized more TBF than TBR on the sad face [(2.1 ± 1.3) vs.(2.1 ± 1.3), P<0.05], what is so-called post-suppression rebound effect.Conclusion The depressed patients showed no DF effect overall. Compared withhealthy controls, depressed patients is deficient in inhibiting negative information, whereas inhibition function for positive material was unaffected. It also may be the reason why the depression group not found DF effect overall. These results indicate that cannot forgetting negative material effectively may be a factor to lead to depressed patients’ negative cognitive prejudice.