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Depressed patients show cognitive deficits along with mood disturbances. Growing evidence suggests an impairment at the level of executive control, which might account in part for patients' difficulties in everyday activities and cognitive performance. Furthermore, there is evidence that depressive patients show information processing biases for emotional information which are thought to play a role in the etiology and maintenance of the disorder. Attentional bias occurs in an early stage of information processing, while memory bias occurs in a later stage of processing (strategic elaboration). The goal of this study was to investigate executive control (the Stroop test) and information processing biases for emotional information in an early stage of processing (the emotional Stroop test) and in a later stage of processing (memory recognition test) in healthy subjects and depressive patients. A further objective of this study was to compare the performance of melancholic and non-melancholic depressive patients in the Stroop test, in the emotional Stroop test and in the memory recognition test. Last, we wanted to investigate the relationship between the performance in an executive control task (the Stroop effect) and information processing bias measures for emotional information. This study is the first to investigate the Stroop test, the emotional Stroop test and the memory recognition test in the same healthy subjects and depressed patients. Furthermore, this is the first study investigating information processing biases for emotional information in the melancholic and non-melancholic patients.

Executive Control And Emotional Processing Biases In Depressive Patients

How does memory work? How do we understand language, and produce it so that others can understand? How do we perceive our environment? How do we infer from patterns of light or sound the presence of objects in our environment, and their properties? How do we reason, and solve problems? How do we think? These are some of the foundational questions that cognitive psychology examines. They are foundational partly because each concerns the nature of a basic psychological ability, abilities that we often take for granted, yet which are vital to our normal, healthy functioning and are key to our understanding of what it means to be human. And they are foundational partly because they are important for psychology as a whole, and not just cognitive psychology. For instance, how canwe hope to understand completely the behaviour of employees in an organization unless we first understand their perceptions and memories, and how they reason and attempt to solve problems? How canwe understand the way inwhich people interact to shape one another’s opinions if we do not understand how people understand and process language, and how they make judgements? Throughout this book, the various authors tackle these and other questions, and show you how much of these foundations cognitive psychologists have so far uncovered. The book begins with an exploration of perceptual processes, moves to a discussion of categorization and language, through to memory, and then to thinking processes. The last part of the book is devoted to wider issues: to topics that have been thought to present a challenge to cognitive psychology – such as consciousness and emotion – and to some of the themes and theoretical questionswhich pervade the cognitive approach

Foundations Of Cognitive Psychology