Emotional Working Memory Impairment And Its Intervention In Dysphoric College Students

As one of the core systems of general cognitive function,working memory(WM)is responsible for simultaneous processing and maintaining information in a brief period.Emotional information processing bias in working memory(WM)refers to the tendency to preferentially process mood-congruent negative materials stored in WM in patients with Major Depressive Disorder(MDD),and is considered as the core manifest of cognitive vulnerability of MDD.This study was designed to investigate the plasticity and transferability of emotional WM in subclinical depression.The first study was aimed to investigate emotional WM processing in dysphoric college students;the second study was aimed to examine the effects of adapted version of Emotional working memory training(eWMT)versus the active control training(CT)on cognitive and emotional outcomes.In study one,38 dysphoric college students and 38 healthy college students were recruited,and emotional 2-back and 3-back tasks were utilized to assess emotional WM function.In study two,34 dysphoric college students were randomly allocated to eWMT(n=16)or CT group(n=18),and all participants took part in 14 computerized trainings in the laboratory,once a day,each training session lasts.about 30 min to 45 min.Operation span task and emotional N-back task were used to assess the near transfer effect to untrained WM paradigms;emotional Stroop task and dot-probe task were used to assess the far transfer to untrained cognitive functions other than WM;Beck Depression Inventory-II(BDI-Ⅱ),Ruminative Responses Scale(RRS)and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory(S-TAI)were used to assess the far transfer about clinical symptoms of depression.These cognitive task and self-reported questionnaires were administered at pre-training(before the training),post-training(immediately after the training)and follow-up(one month after the training)sessions.The major findings are as follows:1.Dysphoric college students showed deficits in emotion processing in WM compared with the controls.2.Performance on the eWM task showed significant improvement in the training group.3.The eWMT group demonstrated significant improvement on the emotion 3-back task,compared with the CT group,indicating near transfer effects to similar tasks.4.The paired t-test showed that the eWMT could reduce severity of depressive symptoms and rumination in the training group.5.The near transfer effect to emotional 3-back were maintained in the follow-up test.