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Negative Words (negative + word)
Selected AbstractsImpaired selection of relevant positive information in depressionDEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 5 2009Sara M. Levens Ph.D. Abstract Background: A hallmark characteristic of depression is the inability to regulate the effect of emotional material on cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that depressed individuals are less able than are nondepressed persons to expel irrelevant negative information from working memory (WM), thereby exacerbating the effects of negative content on cognition. The primary goal of this study was to examine whether depressed individuals are also impaired at selecting relevant positive content in the context of representations competing for resources in WM; such an impairment would limit depressed persons' ability to use positive material to ameliorate the cognitive effects of negative information. Methods: We administered a Recency-probes task with neutral, positive, and negative words to 20 currently depressed and 22 never-depressed participants. This task assesses the selection of relevant content in WM by inducing interference between current and prior representations of a stimulus in WM. Reaction times to interference and noninterference trials were compared across valence and group to assess how effectively depressed individuals select task-relevant emotional content to resolve interference. Results: Compared to never-depressed controls, depressed individuals were impaired in selecting task-relevant positive stimuli; the performance of the two groups was comparable for selecting task-relevant neutral and negative stimuli. Conclusions: Findings indicate that a valence-specific deficit in WM may contribute to the inability of depressed individuals to regulate emotion, and provide empirical support for formulations that implicate positive insensitivity in the maintenance of depression. Depression and Anxiety, 2009. Published 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Individual Differences in Approach and Avoidance Movements: How the Avoidance Motive Influences Response ForceJOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 4 2006Rosa Maria Puca ABSTRACT The present research is based on the assumption that people differ in their responsiveness to incentives and threats. In two experiments we examined whether the trait corresponding to the responsiveness to threats (avoidance motive) and the trait corresponding to the responsiveness to incentives (approach motive) influence voluntary motor behavior toward or away from stimuli. In Experiment 1, stimuli consisted of positive and negative words within a lexical decision task. Participants moved their arms backward in order to withdraw from the stimuli or forward in order to approach them. In Experiment 2, participants responded with forward or backward arm movements to neutral sounds coming from behind or in front of them. The main dependent variable was the strength of the approach and avoidance movements. In both experiments this variable was related to participants' avoidance-motive disposition but not to their approach-motive disposition. Avoidance-motivated individuals generally showed more forceful avoidance movements than approach movements. There was no effect of stimulus valence on the strength of the movements in Experiment 1. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that it is not the physical direction (forward or backward) but rather the movement's effect of distance reduction (approach) or distance increase (avoidance) in regard to the stimulus that defines a movement as an approach or an avoidance movement. [source] Modulation of ongoing cognitive processes by emotionally intense wordsPSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 2 2008Luis Carretié Abstract Contrary to what occurs with negative pictures, negative words are, in general, not capable of interfering with performance in ongoing cognitive tasks in normal subjects. A probable explanation is the limited arousing power of linguistic material. Especially intense words (insults and compliments), neutral personal adjectives, and pseudowords were presented to 28 participants while they executed a lexical decision task. Insults were associated with the poorest performance in the task and compliments with the best. Amplitude of the late positive component of the event-related potentials, originating at parietal areas, was maximal in response to compliments and insults, but latencies were delayed in response to the latter. Results suggest that intense emotional words modulate ongoing cognitive processes through both bottom-up (attentional capture by insults) and top-down (facilitation of cognitive processing by arousing words) mechanisms. [source] Stress and selective attention: The interplay of mood, cortisol levels, and emotional information processingPSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 6 2002Mark A. Ellenbogen The effects of a stressful challenge on the processing of emotional words were examined in college students. Stress induction was achieved using a competitive computer task, where the individual either repeatedly lost or won against a confederate. Mood, attention, and cortisol were recorded during the study. There were four findings: (1) Participants in the negative stressor condition were faster to shift attention away from negative words than positive or neutral words; (2) attentional shifts away from negative words were associated with stress-induced mood lowering; (3) participants in the negative stress condition with elevated scores on the Beck Depression Inventory were slow to disengage attention from all stimuli; and (4) elevated depression scores were associated with lower cortisol change from baseline during the experimental phase, and with higher cortisol levels during the recovery phase. These findings point to information-processing strategies as a means to regulate emotion, and to atypical features of cognitive and adrenocortical function that may serve as putative risk markers of depression. [source] Training the forgetting of negative words: The role of direct suppression and the relation to stress reactivityAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Joelle LeMoult Recent research has demonstrated that people can be trained to forget negative material. This experiment assessed the possible benefit of direct suppression in addition to the benefit of thought substitutes (indirect suppression) on subsequent attempts to recall words. We also investigated the association between recall following suppression training and subsequent responses to an acute laboratory stressor. After learning cue-target word pairs, participants completed a training phase in which they practiced suppressing targets and recalling substitutes or simply recalling substitutes with no instruction to suppress. Our results show similar effects of suppression condition on forgetting. Importantly, however, the absence of direct suppression predicted mood change in response to a subsequently presented laboratory stressor. These results suggest that direct suppression is not necessary for forgetting to occur, but it seems to protect against negative emotional consequences of interference-induced forgetting. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Cognitive biases in depressed and non-depressed referred youthCLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY (AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY & PRACTICE), Issue 5 2008Benedikte Timbremont This study examined cognitive vulnerability in both depressed and non-depressed referred youngsters. Formerly depressed (FD) children and adolescents (n = 16) were compared to a currently depressed (CD) group (n = 18) on a self-referent encoding and memory task imbedded in a mood induction paradigm. In order to test the specificity of the findings to depression, the results of the FD were further compared with those of a clinical but never depressed (ND) group (n = 39) diagnosed with anxiety and/or disruptive behaviour disorders. The study confirmed the hypothesized differences between the groups in terms of self-referent encoding bias. Both the ND (p < 0.001) and FD (p < 0.001) group rated more positive words than negative words as self-descriptive while the CD endorsed a closer balance of positive and negative words (non-significant difference). No interaction effect was found for the recall task. The FD group evinced a similar memory bias than the CD group. However, also in the ND group, the number of proportional recalled positive words did not differ from the proportional recalled negative words. The findings yielded no evidence for a depression-specific information-processing bias. However, all subjects (FD, CD as well as ND) exhibited a memory bias and therefore ,clinical status' is considered as a cognitive vulnerability risk factor for developing a depressive disorder in the future.,Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||