Abstract
Changes in mind-wandering (MW) and involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM) in dysphoria have been explored with conflicting results. The aim of this study was to evaluate both MW and IAM in a group of 23 stable dysphoric participants compared to 37 controls and to compare their thoughts characteristics (i.e., specificity, visual perspective, time orientation, and emotional valence). To make this study comparable with previous research, we used two different monotonous vigilance tasks (with and without verbal interference stimuli). Our results showed a significantly greater focus on MW thoughts in dysphoria. The characteristics of spontaneous thoughts content did not differ significantly between our dysphoric participants and controls, which is not in favor of strong emotional dysfunction. Our results suggest a difficulty to regulate the occurrence of self-generated thoughts rather than their content, that may confer to dysphoric subjects increased cognitive risk to develop a major depressive episode.
Highlights
Dysphoria is defined by the presence of depressive symptoms that do not fulfill the diagnostic criteria of a major depressive episode (MDE) but may cause personal suffering in daily life and increased risk for a MDE
We evaluated the attentional fluctuations of the LDT and Verbal Interference Monotonous Task (VIMT) tasks from the number of errors and the variability of the reaction times
We observed no effect of the task order on the kind of thoughts (TO: c2 = 0.5746, p = 0.448; ZO: c2 = 2.357, p = 0.154) except for a tendency for more on-task thoughts (OT) thoughts when the VIMT was performed before the LDT than in the reverse order (OT: c2 = 3.109, p = 0.078)
Summary
Dysphoria is defined by the presence of depressive symptoms that do not fulfill the diagnostic criteria of a major depressive episode (MDE) but may cause personal suffering in daily life and increased risk for a MDE. Depressive symptoms may lead to difficulties in retrieving specific information with vivid and emotional details in the autobiographical memory store [5]. Lemogne et al [6] showed that the reduction of episodic details affects both positive and negative events in acute depressed patients, depending on the presence or absence of intrusive negative memories. On the opposite, depending on the mode of remembering, subjects with depressive symptoms may retrieve information with normal specific and emotional details [7], especially when memory is involuntary recalled. Watson et al [7] showed, using diary assessment, that acute major depression did not change perceived vividness of events during the recall of involuntary autobiographical memories, unlike during the voluntary recall of autobiographical memory events
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