Efficient filtering of sad and fearful faces from working memory in dysphoria

In this paper, we tested whether task-irrelevant sad and fearful faces are differently stored by dysphoric (elevated amount of depressive symptoms) and control participants who performed a visual working memory (VWM) task related to objects’ colors. We found that even if the groups differ neither in their VWM capacity, nor behavioral distractibility, they differed in filtering ability as indexed by the contralateral delay activity, a specific index for the maintenance phase of the VWM. Control participants unnecessarily stored fearful faces in memory, but they were able to filter sad faces, suggesting that specifically threatening faces are difficult to filter from VWM in healthy individuals. Dysphoric participants filtered both fearful and sad face distractors efficiently. Thus, depression-related attentional bias toward sad faces, if existing here, seems not to result in unnecessary storage of sad faces. Our results suggest a threat-related filtering difficulty and unexpected lack of this difficulty in negative face filtering in participants with depression symptoms.

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Recommended citation: Ye, C., Xu, Q., Li, X., Ruohonen, E., Liu, Q., & Astikainen, P. (2020). Efficient filtering of sad and fearful faces from working memory in dysphoria. Psyarxiv, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6hj75