Paula T. Hertel

Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships

This chapter is concerned with the thinking processes of the intimate dyad. So, although we will focus from time to time on the thinking processes of the individual—as they influence and are influenced by the relationship with another person—our prime interest is in thinking as it occurs at the dyadic level. This may be dangerous territory for inquiry. After all, this topic resembles one that has, for many years now, represented something of a “black hole” in the social sciences—the study of the group mind. For good reasons, the early practice of drawing an analogy between the mind of the individual and the cognitive operations of the group has long been avoided, and references to the group mind in contemporary literature have dwindled to a smattering of wisecracks.

Cognitive Bias Modification Past Perspectives, Current Findings, and Future Applications

Research conducted within the general paradigm of cognitive bias modification (CBM) reveals that emotional biases in attention, interpretation, and memory are not merely associated with emotional disorders but contribute to them. After briefly describing research on both emotional biases and their modification, the authors examine similarities between CBM paradigms and older experimental paradigms used in research on learning and memory. The techniques and goals of CBM research are compared with other approaches to understanding cognition–emotion interactions. From a functional perspective, the CBM tradition reminds us to use experimental tools to evaluate assumptions about clinical phenomena and, more generally, about causal relationships between cognitive processing and emotion.

Depressive Deficits in Forgetting

The aim of this study was to investigate whether difficulties in forgetting (like difficulties in remembering) are associated with depressive states. First, dysphoric and nondysphoric students learned 40 word pairs, each consisting of a positive or negative adjective and a neutral noun (target). Next, the students practiced responding with some targets and suppressing others, when given the adjective as cue, for a varied number of repetitions. On the final test, they were told to disregard the prior instruction to suppress and to recall the target associated with every cue. Compared with nondysphoric students, dysphoric students recalled similar percentages of targets from sets assigned for response practice but higher percentages from sets assigned for suppression practice. The degree of forgetting showed some mood-congruent tendencies and was significantly correlated with self-report measures of rumination and unwanted thoughts.

Training Forgetting of Negative Material in Depression

In this study, the authors investigated whether training participants to use cognitive strategies can aid forgetting in depression. Participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) and never-depressed participants learned to associate neutral cue words with a positive or negative target word and were then instructed not to think about the negative targets when shown their cues. The authors compared 3 different conditions: an unaided condition, a positive-substitute condition, and a negative-substitute condition. In the substitute conditions, participants were instructed to use new targets to keep from thinking about the original targets. After the training phase, participants were instructed to recall all targets when presented with the cues. MDD participants, in contrast with control participants, did not exhibit forgetting of negative words in the unaided condition. In both the negative and positive substitute conditions, however, MDD participants showed successful forgetting of negative words and a clear practice effect. In contrast, negative substitute words did not aid forgetting by the control participants. These findings suggest that training depressed individuals to use cognitive strategies can increase forgetting of negative words.

Remembering the Good, Forgetting the Bad: Intentional Forgetting of Emotional Material in Depression

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases.

Relation between rumination and impaired memory in dysphoric moods

College students in dysphoric or nondysphoric moods studied pairs of words and later took a fragment-completion test of memory for targets from the pairs (under process-dissociation procedures for obtaining estimates of controlled and automatic retrieval; L. L. Jacoby, 1996). Between the study and test phases, some participants waited quietly for 7 min; others rated self-focused materials designed to invoke ruminations in the dysphoric group; and still others rated self-irrelevant and task-irrelevant materials. A dysphoria-related impairment in controlled retrieval occurred in the first 2 conditions but not in the 3rd condition. These results show that the nature of task-irrelevant thoughts contributes to memory impairments in dysphoria and suggest that self-focused rumination might also contribute to similar impairments under unconstrained conditions that permit mind wandering.

Intentional forgetting benefits from thought substitution

This study provides both experimental and correlational evidence that forgetting in the think/no-think paradigm (Anderson & Green, 2001) is sensitive to the substitution of thoughts about new events for thoughts that are to be suppressed. All the participants learned a list of adjective-noun pairs. Then the adjectives were presented as cues for recalling half of the nouns and as cues for suppressing the other half, 0, 2, or 12 times.Aided participants were provided with substitute nouns, to use during suppression. On a final test that requested recall of all initially learned nouns, aided participants showed evidence of below-baseline forgetting of suppressed nouns.Unaided participants produced below-baseline forgetting only if their later self-reports indicated that they had complied relatively well with instructions for suppression. Independently, forgetting in the unaided condition was more successful when the participants reportedly thought about something else during suppression trials. In general, the use of selfinitiated strategiesseems to affect the degree of forgetting in the think/no-think paradigm.

Emotionality in free recall: Language specificity in bilingual memory

Abstract Bilingual subjects (Spanish English) who had acquired fluency in their second language after 8 years of age rated 18 emotional and 18 neutral words for ease of pronunciation, implied activity, or emotionality; half of each type was presented in Spanish and half in English. During a subsequent, unexpected test of free recall subjects recalled more emotional than neutral words, but only for words that had been presented in the native language. This finding applied across native-language groups and suggests that emotion provides a basis for language specificity in bilingual memory.

Depression-related Impairments in Prospective Memory

Time-based prospective memory, the ability to carry out a future intention at a specified time, was found to be impaired in a community sample of clinically depressed adults, relative to a nondepressed sample. Nondepressed participants monitored the time more frequently and, in the final block of the task, accelerated time-monitoring as the target time for the prospective memory response approached. These results are consistent with previous findings of depression-related impairments in retrospective memory tasks that require controlled, self-initiated processing.

Cognitive bias modification: induced interpretive biases affect memory.

Previous research has shown that it is possible to experimentally induce interpretive biases using ambiguous scenarios. This study extends past findings by examining the effects of cognitive bias modification for interpretation on subsequent scenario recall. Participants were trained to interpret emotionally ambiguous passages in either a positive or negative direction. Transfer of the training to novel scenarios was tested. After training, participants were also asked to recall details from these novel scenarios. The results indicate that the training was effective in inducing the intended group differences in interpretive bias. Importantly, participants exhibited memory biases that corresponded to their training condition. These results suggest that manipulating interpretive biases can result in corresponding changes in memory. Findings from this study highlight the importance of future research on the relation among cognitive biases and on the possibility of modifying cognitive biases in emotional disorders.