Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression
BACKGROUND: Goal neglect refers to a dissociation between intended and actual action. Although commonly associated with frontal brain damage, this phenomenon is also characteristic of clinical depression. To date, tests of goal neglect typically require individuals to switch between subtasks populat...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Cambridge University Press
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7168650/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31057139 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000886 |
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author | Werner-Seidler, Aliza Dahm, Theresa Golden, Ann-Marie Manly, Tom Dalgleish, Tim |
author_facet | Werner-Seidler, Aliza Dahm, Theresa Golden, Ann-Marie Manly, Tom Dalgleish, Tim |
author_sort | Werner-Seidler, Aliza |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Goal neglect refers to a dissociation between intended and actual action. Although commonly associated with frontal brain damage, this phenomenon is also characteristic of clinical depression. To date, tests of goal neglect typically require individuals to switch between subtasks populated with neutral stimuli. This study examined the impact of affective and personally salient stimulus contexts on goal neglect in clinical depression. METHODS: Participants were randomly allocated to either positively or negatively-valenced versions of the Affective Six Elements Test (A-SET). We hypothesised that depressed individuals (n = 30) would exhibit an overall impairment in A-SET performance by neglecting entire subtasks and allocating suboptimal time to each task, relative to never-depressed peers (n = 30), with effects being strongest for the negatively-valenced version. RESULTS: Findings showed that depressed individuals exhibited specific deficits, relative to controls on these measures in the negative A-SET only, with a magnitude comparable to that found in brain injured patients. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with depression are impaired in their ability to monitor performance and implement strategies that are optimal for the purpose of pursuing an overarching goal when the task context is negatively-valenced. Potential mechanisms are discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7168650 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Cambridge University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-71686502020-04-27 Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression Werner-Seidler, Aliza Dahm, Theresa Golden, Ann-Marie Manly, Tom Dalgleish, Tim Psychol Med Original Articles BACKGROUND: Goal neglect refers to a dissociation between intended and actual action. Although commonly associated with frontal brain damage, this phenomenon is also characteristic of clinical depression. To date, tests of goal neglect typically require individuals to switch between subtasks populated with neutral stimuli. This study examined the impact of affective and personally salient stimulus contexts on goal neglect in clinical depression. METHODS: Participants were randomly allocated to either positively or negatively-valenced versions of the Affective Six Elements Test (A-SET). We hypothesised that depressed individuals (n = 30) would exhibit an overall impairment in A-SET performance by neglecting entire subtasks and allocating suboptimal time to each task, relative to never-depressed peers (n = 30), with effects being strongest for the negatively-valenced version. RESULTS: Findings showed that depressed individuals exhibited specific deficits, relative to controls on these measures in the negative A-SET only, with a magnitude comparable to that found in brain injured patients. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with depression are impaired in their ability to monitor performance and implement strategies that are optimal for the purpose of pursuing an overarching goal when the task context is negatively-valenced. Potential mechanisms are discussed. Cambridge University Press 2020-04 2019-05-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7168650/ /pubmed/31057139 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000886 Text en © Cambridge University Press 2019 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Articles Werner-Seidler, Aliza Dahm, Theresa Golden, Ann-Marie Manly, Tom Dalgleish, Tim Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title | Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title_full | Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title_fullStr | Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title_full_unstemmed | Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title_short | Personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
title_sort | personally salient, emotionally negative task contexts provoke goal neglect in depression |
topic | Original Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7168650/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31057139 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000886 |
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