Differences of biased recall memory for emotional information among children and adolescents of mothers with MDD, children and adolescents with MDD, and normal controls
Introduction
There is an association between depression and the preferential processing for negative valence of emotional information (Gollan et al., 2008, Leppänen et al., 2004). Moreover, abnormal emotional processing persists in the non-depressive children and adolescents of parents with depression (Joormann et al., 2007, Moradi et al., 2000). In addition, cognitive bias is a risk factor for the subsequent development of depression in predisposed individuals (Raes et al., 2006, van Oostrom et al., 2013). Furthermore, there is a bias towards negative emotions in depression (Maalouf et al., 2012).
The content-specificity hypothesis states that stimuli, whose affective valence matches the person׳s emotional state, will be remembered better (Beck et al., 1987, Beck and Perkins, 2001). Also, Williams et al. (1988) proposed that depression is associated with a cognitive bias favoring sadness. According to these models, depression is associated with a cognitive bias (explicit memory bias) towards sad information.
Moreover, there is an “emotional contagion” between family members (9, Rapson et al., 1993). It is postulated that the family members synergistically trigger each other leading to arousal, re-experience, and avoidance symptoms in vicious cycles.
Depressed individuals in comparison to never depressed controls are impaired in selecting task-relevant positive stimuli (Levens and Gotlib, 2009). Formerly depressed individuals more than never-depressed individuals recall negative self-referent information (Romero et al., 2014). In addition, intrusive memory of negative past memories is common in depression (Williams and Moulds, 2007). Dysphoria is associated with less retrieval of positive memories in children (O’Carroll et al., 2006). Moreover, there is a debate about decreased autobiographical memory and poor outcome of depression (Raes et al., 2006).
There is a higher vulnerability to depression in relatives of patients with major depressive disorder. Negative cognitive bias is stronger in these relatives (Watters et al., 2013). Never-depressed females with a positive family history of depression selectively attend to negative information and not to neural information (van Oostrom et al., 2013).In addition, this cognitive bias is a trait and contributes to develop depression (van Oostrom et al., 2013). Van Oostrom et al. use the term “negative affective processing bias” to explain dysfunctional inhibition of negative information. They proposed that negative affective processing bias is an endophenotype of depression, i.e., a heritable trait marker for the risk of developing depression (van Oostrom et al., 2013).
Several research studies have been conducted on the cognitive characteristics of adults with depression. But few studies investigated this matter in children and adolescents (Baert et al., 2010, Beeney and Arnett, 2008, Conklin et al., 2009). Most of the researches have used experimental approaches to investigate cognitive bias in emotional disorders in adults but not in children and adolescents (Gollan et al., 2008, Leppänen et al., 2004). Evidence have shown that depressed children and adolescents display the same symptoms of cognitive biases as those observed in depressed adults (Jacobs et al., 2008, Moradi et al., 2000).
The study investigates some selected aspects of cognitive processing (explicit memory bias) in children and adolescents who had a parent (mother) with major depressive disorder (MDD) but these children were without positive personal histories of major depressive disorder themselves. One of the groups was children and adolescents with MDD. It is hypothesized that children and adolescents with MDD and children and adolescents of mothers with MDD are cognitively biased toward recalling negative emotional stimuli as compared with the healthy control group. It is also examined whether the healthy control children and adolescents recall the happy words (positive stimuli) more than the other two groups. In order to avoid emotional contagious effect, we screen out participants whose siblings and fathers have major depressive disorder. Furthermore, we compared the two groups of children and adolescents with MDD and children and adolescents of mothers with MDD.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were children and adolescents aged from 11 to 17 years old. The three groups were: 1) 28 children and adolescents (off spring) (15 boys and 13 girls)̦ aged from 11 to 17 years old whose mothers met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) (Table 1). These children and adolescents of mothers with MDD did not meet criteria for MDD, and neither did their sisters, brothers, nor fathers.
2) The group of children and adolescents with major depressive disorder
Results
Half of the participants in the three groups were boys (Table 1). The participants in the three groups were matched for age, gender, educational level. The results of a repeated measure ANOVA showed that the interaction of word score and group was significant (F(4, 164)=40.9, P<0.001) (Fig. 1).
Recall Task scores of the three groups of children and adolescents using ANOVA are displayed in Table 2.
Discussion
The current study compared explicit memory bias for emotional information among children and adolescents of mothers with MDD, children and adolescents with MDD, and healthy controls. The current results showed that the score of the word types were different among the three groups.
Children and adolescents in healthy control group recall sad words less than that of the other two groups. Moreover, those in the healthy group recall happy words more than that of the other two groups. Meanwhile, the
Acknowledgments
There is no conflict of interest to be declared.
References (32)
- et al.
Attentional bias training in depression: therapeutic effects depend on depression severity
Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
(2010) - et al.
Attitude formation in depression: evidence for deficits in forming positive attitudes
Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
(2009) - et al.
The development of a corpus of emotional words produced by children and adolescents
Personality and Individual Differences
(1999) - et al.
Identifying differences in biased affective information processing in major depression
Psychiatry Research
(2008) - et al.
Empirical evidence of cognitive vulnerability for depression among children and adolescents: a cognitive science and developmental perspective
Clinical Psychology Review
(2008) - et al.
Depression biases the recognition of emotionally neutral faces
Psychiatry Research
(2004) - et al.
Bias to negative emotions: a depression state-dependent marker in adolescent major depressive disorder
Psychiatry Research
(2012) - et al.
Memory bias for emotional information in children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder: a preliminary study
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
(2000) - et al.
Memory biases in remitted depression: the role of negative cognitions at explicit and automatic processing levels
Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
(2014) - et al.
A Persian translation of the structured clinical interview for diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition: psychometric properties
Comprehensive Psychiatry
(2009)
Never-depressed females with a family history of depression demonstrate affective bias
Psychiatry Research
Using multiple methods to characterize the phenotype of individuals with a family history of major depressive disorder
Journal of Affective Disorders
Differentiating anxiety and depression: a test of the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
Cognitive content-specificity for anxiety and depression: a meta-analysis
Cognitive Therapy and Research
Stress and memory bias interact to predict depression in multiple sclerosis
Neuropsychology
Psychometric properties of the Farsi translation of the kiddie schedule for affective disorders and schizophrenia-present and lifetime version
BMC Psychiatry
Cited by (14)
Recall bias during adolescence: Gender differences and associations with depressive symptoms
2021, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :If self-referential negative recall is a risk factor for depressive symptoms, it may be more important for girls. Both increased negative and reduced positive self-referential recall were associated with depressive symptoms, as found in some previous studies (Fattahi Asl et al., 2015; Speed et al., 2016). This finding differs to a recent review, which did not find consistent evidence for memory biases in adolescent depression (Platt et al., 2017).
Explicit emotional memory biases in mood disorders: A systematic review
2019, Psychiatry ResearchCitation Excerpt :In this way, EM performance in HCs represents the behavioural phenotype expected under normal physiological conditions and therefore represents an estimate of baseline performance to which performance in the clinical groups can be compared. Previous studies have consistently shown that HCs display more accurate memory for both emotionally-positive and emotionally-negative information, compared to emotionally-neutral information (Asl et al., 2015; Cahill and McGaugh, 1995; Flaisch et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2015). This may be explained by the observation that emotional salience is more likely to signify an event that is relevant to survival (Cahill and McGaugh, 1995; Flaisch et al., 2016).
Overnight retention of emotional memories is influenced by BDNF Val66Met but not 5-HTTLPR
2019, Behavioural Brain ResearchThe effect of sleep deprivation on emotional memory consolidation in participants reporting depressive symptoms
2018, Neurobiology of Learning and MemoryCitation Excerpt :Individuals reporting symptoms of depression such as despair and hopelessness exhibit greater recall and recognition performance for negative emotional stimuli, relative to individuals reporting minimal/no depressive symptoms (Everaert, Duyck, & Koster, 2014; Fattahi Asl, Ghanizadeh, Mollazade, & Aflakseir, 2015; Howe & Malone, 2011).
The influence of REM sleep and SWS on emotional memory consolidation in participants reporting depressive symptoms
2018, CortexCitation Excerpt :Relative to individuals reporting minimal depressive symptoms, those exhibiting symptoms of depression such as despair and hopelessness have repeatedly been shown to have a greater ability to recall and recognise negative emotional information (Howe & Malone, 2011; Everaert, Duyck, & Koster, 2014; Fattahi Asl, Ghanizadeh, Mollazade, & Aflakseir, 2015).
Biased Maintenance of Attention on Sad Faces in Clinically Depressed Youth: An Eye-Tracking Study
2023, Child Psychiatry and Human Development