Effects of two different emotion-inducing methods on the emotional memory of non-clinically depressed individuals.

Wuji Lin,Jun Deng,Lei Mo,Xiaoqing Cai,Yuan Gao,Jingyuan Lin,Angela Sirigu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0249863

Wuji Lin, Jun Deng + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249863

Copy DOI

Abstract

In the study of emotional memory bias in depressed individuals, most previous studies have used emotional materials, but there were significant differences in the effects of different emotion-inducing methods on face memory. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to explore the effects of different emotion-inducing methods on memory between healthy participants and non-clinically depressed participants. The results from experiment 1 showed that when feedback was used as induction, the memory performance of the non-clinical depression group was significantly higher than that of the healthy group under the condition of negative feedback. Under positive and neutral feedback, there were no significant differences between the two groups. In experiment 2, when emotional materials were used as a mode of induction, no significantly difference in each emotional condition between the healthy and depressed groups was found. The results of the present study show that different methods of emotional induction have different effects on depressed participants. Compared with the emotion induced by the emotional material, the non-clinical depressed participants had a better memory effect induced by negative emotional events.

Highlights

Numerous studies have shown that recall or recognition of depression-related materials in depressed individuals has a relatively obvious bias [1,2,3], which is called the negative moodcongruent effect [4,5,6]
The results showed that in the case of emotion caused by feedback, positive feedback enhanced the memory of faces, while negative feedback decreased memory performance
Different emotional conditions were formed by connecting the feedback results with neutral faces to explore whether there was a difference in the effect of emotional events on memory between depressed individuals and healthy individuals

Summary

Introduction

Numerous studies have shown that recall or recognition of depression-related materials in depressed individuals has a relatively obvious bias [1,2,3], which is called the negative moodcongruent effect [4,5,6]. There are many studies on directed forgetting that use emotional materials to induce emotions [13, 14] These studies have consistently found that depressed participants recall fewer positive items than non-depressed participants, but they can recall more negative and neutral items. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether distinct negative mood-congruent effect produced differences in face memory between non-clinically depressed individuals and healthy individuals. Different emotional conditions were formed by connecting the feedback results with neutral faces to explore whether there was a difference in the effect of emotional events on memory between depressed individuals and healthy individuals. Faces expressing different emotions were used as the emotion-inducing material to explore whether there were differences in the effects of the emotional materials on memory in the two groups

Methods

Results

Discussion