title: Updating emotional content in recovered depressed individuals: Evaluating deficits in emotion processing following a depressive episode.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Previous research has demonstrated that depressed individuals have difficulty both disengaging from negative information and maintaining positive information in working memory (WM). The present study was conducted to examine whether the tendency for depressed individuals to maintain negative content in WM and to experience difficulties maintaining positive content in WM is due to negative mood (in)congruency effects during a depressive episode, or whether these tendencies are evident outside of a depressive episode.
  
  
  METHODS
  Individuals who had recovered from a depressive episode and never disordered controls performed emotion 0-back and 2-back tasks designed to assess biases in updating emotional content in working memory.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Similar to currently depressed individuals in previous studies, recovered depressed participants disengaged from happy stimuli more quickly and from sad stimuli more slowly than did their never-depressed counterparts.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Despite the extension of a depression-specific finding to recovered depressed individuals, the present study does not test whether the identified emotion updating biases predict long-term relapse or recovery.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The obtained results suggest that a decreased ability to disengage from negative content and to maintain positive content in WM represents a trait-like cognitive style that impairs adaptive emotion regulation and may contribute to the recurrent nature of depression.
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. Electronic address: slevens@uncc.edu.
authors.forename: Sara M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Levens
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, USA.
authors.forename: Ian H
authors.initials: IH
authors.lastname: Gotlib
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D020127:Recovery of Function; D012008:Recurrence
keywords: Depression; Emotion; Recovered; Updating; Working memory