Cognition and Depression: Current Status and Future Directions

By Ian H. Gotlib, Jutta Joormann. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 2010

2,342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive theories of depression posit that people’s thoughts, inferences, attitudes, and interpretations, and the way in which they attend to and recall information, can increase their risk for depression. Three mechanisms have been implicated in the relation between biased cognitive processing and the dysregulation of emotion in depression: inhibitory processes and deficits in working memory, ruminative responses to negative mood states and negative life events, and the inability to use positive and rewarding stimuli to regulate negative mood. In this review, we present a contemporary characterization of depressive cognition and discuss how different cognitive processes are related not only to each other, but also to emotion dysregulation, the hallmark feature of depression. We conclude that depression is characterized by increased elaboration of negative information, by difficulties disengaging from negative material, and by deficits in cognitive control when processing negative information. We discuss treatment implications of these conclusions and argue that the study of cognitive aspects of depression must be broadened by investigating neural and genetic factors that are related to cognitive dysfunction in this disorder. Such integrative investigations should help us gain a more comprehensive understanding of how cognitive and biological factors interact to affect the onset, maintenance, and course of depression.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6dd560b45d85818a3f3cc471772b3334f8fdac04

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Citations in the corpus

Minority Stressors and Psychological Distress in Transgender Individuals (2017, neutral): “This is a particularly pertinent issue, as distressed participants could be more likely to recall prejudice events (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010).”
Effects of Early Life Stress on Cognitive and Affective Function: An Integrated Review of Human Literature (2010, background): “These dysfunctions could contribute to the progression of mental illness; for example, executive dysfunction may impair emotion regulation and foster rumination as seen in depression (Gotlib and Joormann 2010).”
Negative Interpretation Bias in Individuals with Depressive Symptoms (2012, background): “…interpretation biases have been clinically recorded and accepted as part of depressotypic thinking for decades (Beck 1967, 1976, 1987, 2008; Bower 1981, 1987; Teasdale 1983), online biases have been difficult to assess in interpretation (for reviews see Gotlib and Joorman 2010; Wisco 2009).”
Emotion and Regulation are One! (2011, background): “An example of an exception to such processes are pathological states that are characterized by rumination—specifically in depression (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010).”
A Comparative Study on the Efficacy of a Positive Psychology Intervention and a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Clinical Depression (2017, background): “Experimental studies have also revealed that in order to achieve a more precise and accurate description of the psychopathological mechanisms contributing to depression, factors relating to positive psychological functioning must be taken into account (Gotlib and Joormann 2010).”
A Cognitive Model of Psychological Resilience (2016, background): “Similar notions are apparent in the literature on emotion dysfunction, which has also examined fundamental information processing biases that are largely deemed to be automatic (for reviews see, Cisler & Koster, 2010; Gotlib & Joormann, 2010; Mathews & MacLeod, 2005).”
Neural mechanisms of the cognitive model of depression (2011, background): “Several theorists have suggested that inhibitory deficits are manifested clinically as a ruminative response styl”
A Heuristic for Developing Transdiagnostic Models of Psychopathology (2011, background): “Executive control deficits, particularly in working memory, cognitive and behavioral inhibitory processes, and attentional control, have been associated with both emotional and behavioral disorders and some psychotic disorders (Barch, 2005; Gotlib & Joormann, 2010; Mathews & MacLeod, 2005).”
Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “Mental illness may have similar effects, by capturing attention, causing excessive rumination, and distorting people’s memories and beliefs about their abilities (76).”
Marital quality and health: A meta-analytic review (2013, background): “In the other direction, depression is associated with affective dysregulation and cognitive biases (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010), all of which may filter into marital interactions.”
Attention to Emotional Images in Previously Depressed Individuals: An Eye-Tracking Study (2011, background): “For many researchers, attentional biases are thought to play a crucial role in maintaining a vulnerability to depressive episodes (e.g., De Raedt and Koster 2010; Gotlib and Joormann 2010; Koster et al. 2011).”
From Stress to Inflammation and Major Depressive Disorder: A Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression (2014, background): “Whereas an abundance of research has examined cognitive processes that may mediate the link between stress and depression (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010; Kircanski, Joormann, & Gotlib, 2012), though, relatively little is known about the biological processes that are influenced by stress and that, in…”