Abstract
Deficits in cognitive control have been found in depression, but how they contribute to depressive symptoms remains unknown. The present study investigated whether the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control on negative emotion varies with depression level and whether the regulatory efficacy affects depressive symptoms via the mediation of rumination. Fifty participants screened by the Zung Self-Rating Depressive Scale (SDS) with high and low depression levels were selected. They were instructed to controlled-process different semantic representations of aversive pictures, and the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) evoked by the pictures was used as the measure of electrocortical response. We found that controlled-processing neutral representations of aversive pictures significantly decreased the amplitude of LPP relative to that under controlled-processing unpleasant ones in an early window in the low depression group and that this regulatory effect was impaired in the high depression group. Furthermore, a mediation analyses indicated that the regulatory efficacy of controlled-processing different semantic representations was associated with SDS score via the mediation of rumination. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the association between the function of cognitive control in emotion generation and depressive symptoms and indicated a pathway from the regulatory efficacy of cognitive control to depression via rumination.
Highlights
Depression is a highly prevalent mood disorder mainly characterized by sustained negative affect and anhedonia
Individuals who score high on self-reported measures of depression exhibit impaired attention disengagement from negative information [17], a decreased ability to inhibit the impact of emotional faces [18] and negative words [19]. These findings suggest that the cognitive control deficit in such individuals occurs concurrently with depressive symptoms and is a vulnerability factor of depression
Statistical analysis indicated that participants responded to irrelevant words more slowly than to relevant words (F(1,47) = 15.31, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.25), which demonstrated the effect of cognitive control
Summary
Depression is a highly prevalent mood disorder mainly characterized by sustained negative affect and anhedonia. Abnormalities in down-regulating negative emotions is a hallmark of depression; both clinically depressed patients and nonclinical individuals with high depression levels have difficulties in employing adaptive strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and have an increased tendency to use maladaptive strategy rumination relative to non-depressed controls or individuals with low depression levels [1, 2]. Cognitive models have proposed several risk factors of depression. Emotion regulation of cognitive control, rumination, and depression
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