Remembering the blues: negative emotion during encoding improve memory recall in major depressive Disorder.

Substantial research indicates that individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) remember more negative information compared to neutral and positive information. This phenomenon is commonly attributed to attentional biases toward negative over neutral and positive information. A recent attentional resources model suggests that in MDD, negative cues not only capture attention, but also lead to deeper processing of subsequent information, irrespective of its content.

Negative emotional cues improve free recall of positive and neutral words in unmedicated patients with major depressive disorder.

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibit attentional biases toward negative, mood-congruent stimuli while filtering out positive and neutral stimuli, resulting in memory biases to negative content. While attentional and memory biases in MDD have been extensively studied, the underlying mechanisms of these biases remain unclear. The current study investigates a novel model proposing that exposure to negative emotional cues triggers a transient "attentional window" in individuals with MDD, leading to heightened and deeper cognitive processing of any subsequent information, irrespective of its content.

The effect of emotional primes on attentional focus in high versus low depression.

The effect of negative emotional stimuli on attentional focus is unclear. While a number of studies suggest that negative emotional stimuli improve attention, other studies show the opposite effect-namely, that negative emotional stimuli can impair attention and, specifically, attentional focus. It has been suggested that the detrimental effect of negative stimuli on attention is caused by attentional capture and difficulties in disengaging from the stimuli, an effect that is known to be stronger in depressed individuals.