A Comparison of Affective Working Memory in Depressed and Non-Depressed Women

The purpose of the present study was to investigate and compare the affective working memory in depressed and non-depressed women.

Using purposive sampling method, twenty seven depressed women were selected and matched by age & education with 27 non-depressed women. Data was collected by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the n-back task and were analyzed using paired sample t-test.

Results indicated a weaker function in working memory task for depressed subjects compared to the non-depressed group (p<0.05). Although depressed individuals respond to positive stimuli significantly less than non-depressed people(p<0.05), there is no significant difference between two groups in responding to negative stimuli (p>0.05).

Limited working memory resources, lack of initiative, inability to prevent irrelevant information and rumination were discussed as causes of deficits on working memory task performance in depressed people.