The association between implicit and explicit affective inhibitory control, rumination and depressive symptoms

Orly Shimony,Omer Bonne,Noam Einav,Thomas M. Van Vleet,Joshua T. Jordan,Mor Nahum

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-90875-3

Abstract

Inhibitory control underlies one’s ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. Recent models suggest that impaired inhibition of negative information may contribute to depressive symptoms, and that this association is mediated by rumination. However, the exact nature of this association, particularly in non-clinical samples, is unclear. The current study assessed the relationship between inhibitory control over emotional vs. non-emotional information, rumination and depressive symptoms. A non-clinical sample of 119 participants (mean age: 36.44 ± 11.74) with various levels of depressive symptoms completed three variations of a Go/No-Go task online; two of the task variations required either explicit or implicit processing of emotional expressions, and a third variation contained no emotional expressions (i.e., neutral condition). We found reductions in inhibitory control for participants reporting elevated symptoms of depression on all three task variations, relative to less depressed participants. However, for the task variation that required implicit emotion processing, depressive symptoms were associated with inhibitory deficits for sad and neutral, but not for happy expressions. An exploratory analysis showed that the relationship between inhibition and depressive symptoms occurs in part through trait rumination for all three tasks, regardless of emotional content. Collectively, these results indicate that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with both a general inhibitory control deficit, as well as affective interference from negative emotions, with implications for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders.

Highlights

Inhibitory control underlies one’s ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information
Five of the 119 participants were excluded from further analyses due to the following constraints: responses from 2 participants were not recorded for the inhibitory control tasks, 2 participants performed the tasks on tablets instead of using a PC/ laptop as requested, and one participant experienced technical problems operating the experiment
We examined the relationship between inhibitory control, rumination and the severity of depressive symptoms using three variations of the GNG task, collectively manipulating task requirements for explicit, implicit or no emotional processing

Summary

Introduction

Inhibitory control underlies one’s ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. An exploratory analysis showed that the relationship between inhibition and depressive symptoms occurs in part through trait rumination for all three tasks, regardless of emotional content These results indicate that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with both a general inhibitory control deficit, as well as affective interference from negative emotions, with implications for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders. This, in turn, leads to enhanced processing of mood congruent (i.e., negative) information, resulting in persistent negative mood and the emergence or recurrence of d epression[8,11,13] These models suggest that depression is associated with a specific impairment in inhibiting nega‐ tive information, and importantly, that depressive rumination mediates the link between the reduced inhibitory control over negative stimuli and depression[14,15,16]. The few studies that have employed this paradigm in non-clinical or at-risk samples found reduced pre-potent inhibition to sad expressions in high ruminators[42] and in adolescents who later developed d epression[43]

Methods

Results

Conclusion