Citation

Foland-Ross LC, Hamilton JP, Joormann J, Berman MG, Jonides J, Gotlib IH. Psychol. Sci. 2013; 24(3): 334-344.

Affiliation

1Department of Psychology, Stanford University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797612457380

PMID

23334445

Abstract

Recurrent uncontrollable negative thoughts are a hallmark of depressive episodes. Deficits in cognitive control have been proposed to underlie this debilitating aspect of depression. Here, we used functional neuroimaging during an emotional working memory (WM) task to elucidate the neural correlates of these difficulties in cognitive control. In a WM manipulation involving depressed participants, the dorsal anterior cingulate and parietal and bilateral insular cortices were activated significantly more when negative words were removed from WM than when they were maintained in WM; in contrast, nondepressed participants exhibited stronger neural activations in these regions for positive than for negative material. These findings implicate anomalous activation of components of the task-positive network, known to be modulated by cognitive effort, in depression-associated difficulties in expelling negative material from WM. Future studies should examine the association between these aberrations and the maintenance of depressive symptoms.

Language: en