Effects Of Emotional Working Memory Traininging On Negative Attention Bias Of Individuals With Depression Tendency

Present cognitive processing models of depression suggest that attention bias to negative stimuli is the main cause of depressive symptoms.Defects in cognitive control of negative stimuli lead to attention bias to negative stimuli in individuals with depression tendency,and emotional working memory training can effectively improve emotional cognitive control.However,no research has investigated whether emotional working memory training can improve attention bias to negative stimuli in individuals with depression tendency.Exploring this issue can help workers in mental health to gain insight into the cognitive processing and treatment of depression.In the first study,110 participants were collected.The emotional working memory ability was measured by the emotional dual 3-back task,the attention disengagement and attention orientation to negative stimuli was measured by the dot-probe task.The correlation analysis of the three variables was carried out.The results showed that there was a negative correlation between the emotional working memory and attention orientation to negative stimuli,and a negative correlation between attention orientation to negative stimuli and attention disengagement to negative stimulus.In the second study,41 participants with depression tendency were collected to investigate the effects of emotional working memory training on attention bias to negative stimuli and depressive emotions.Before and after the training,the BDI-II and CES-D scale were used to measure participants’ depressive emotion,the digital span task,spatial span task,emotional Stroop task were used to measure the transfer effect of training,the dot-probe task combined with technique of event-related potential was used to measure the negative attention bias.The results showed that emotional working memory training had a transfer effect on working memory ability,but no transfer effect on spatial working memory task and emotional cognitive control ability.The results of ERP showed that compared with the control group,the amplitude of P100 component was significantly increased in the training group,while P300 component did not change.In addition,the study did not find that emotional working memory training improved the depressive emotion of individuals with depression tendency.The results indicate that emotional working memory training can improve the attention orientation ability of depressed individuals to negative stimuli,but does not change the attention disengagement ability of individuals with depression tendency.