Impact of childhood trauma, alexithymia, dissociation, and emotion suppression on emotional Stroop task.

Objective: Attentional bias to emotion- and illness-related information plays a prominent role in many mental disorders, particularly major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. Using the emotional Stroop task we investigated which variables beyond aspects of patients' psychopathology might influence reaction times and interference in the Stroop test.

Methods: We investigated 82 psychosomatic inpatients and 39 healthy controls.

Cognitive impairment in major depression: association with salivary cortisol.

Background: Cognitive deficits and elevated cortisol are hallmarks of depression. Cortisol acts via mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid receptors, which have their highest density in the hippocampus, a brain area closely related to cognitive function. Several studies have separately examined cortisol secretion and cognitive deficits in depression.

Effects of acute cortisol administration on autobiographical memory in patients with major depression and healthy controls.

Objective: Overgeneral autobiographical memory has become a well established phenomenon within major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroendocrinologically, MDD is often characterized by a dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, i.e.