The emotion regulation effect of unconscious distraction on the subclinical depression

Abstract

Depression is a prevalent affective disorder with adverse consequences. The subclinical depression has the great potential to develop into clinical depression. As a result of impaired inhibitory control function, depressive individuals, whether clinical or subclinical, have difficulties in disengaging themselves actively out of emotional events and their potential consequences or distracting attention to something neutral or pleasant. But instead, depressive individuals are characterized by ruminative coping of negative events and environmental stress. They focus on and indulge in the stress, negative emotions, and their possible consequences. As conscious distraction entails the involvement of cognitive control mechanism and depressive population has cognitive control deficits, conscious distraction may be limited in its efficacy at regulating depressive emotions. Instead, unconscious distraction whose execution does not depend on cognitive control function may be more adaptive in emotion regulation for depressive population. To date, little research has been performed to examine the effect of unconscious distraction on depression in depressive population, despite a couple of studies available to study the effects of intentional distraction. To address this issue, we randomly assigned depressive and non-depressive subjects into control (no-regulation), conscious distraction or unconscious distraction condition, using a complicated arithmetic task with feedback to induce frustration related depression. The positive affect index (PA) and the negative affect index (NA) of positive affect and negative affect scale were used to characterize the emotional state of depressive subjects and how it varies with different forms of distraction regulation. The results showed that, for non-depressive individuals, the PA scores of both conscious and unconscious distraction groups were significantly higher than those of the control group during frustration, while the former two groups showed no significant differences. For depressive individuals, the PA scores of unconscious distraction group were significantly higher than those of the control and the conscious distraction group during frustration, while there was no significant difference between the latter two groups. On the other hand, the conscious and unconscious distraction groups scored significantly lower in NA scores than the control group, irrespective of depression, and the former two groups showed no significant differences. This indicates that, in the face of depression-inducing events, only unconscious distraction is effective in improving positive affect levels for depressive population, though two forms of distraction reduce negative affect and enhance positive affect similarly for non-depressive individuals. In summary, unconscious distraction may be more suitable for the intervention of affective state in depressive population, and the PA may be more sensitive to reflect the change of depressed state compared to the NA.