Emotion and Working Memory in Depression and its Neural Underpinnings

Depressed persons have problems in the processing of aspects of emotion as well as impairments in working memory (Goodin, Lamp, Hughes, Rossell, and Ciorcian, 2019).

Patients with depression and healthy control subjects performed a 3-n-back working memory task consisted of two different types of cues, facial affect and basic visual patterns while undergoing fMRI. The subjects were required to determine if the gender of the presented faces was either the same or different as the face that was presented three pictures ago.

Contrary to what was expected, there were no behavioral differences among the groups on the task. The fMRI results showed that patients with depression failed in the activation of emotional pictures of positive valence as compared to healthy control subjects in the dorsal striatum as well as in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex.

It is suggested that patients with depression have an impairment in the requirement of the dopaminergic dorsal striatum which might cause depressed mood by means of a diminishment in positive emotional stimuli while they are updating working memory (Goodin et al., 2019).