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The effects of dysphoria and rumination on cognitive flexibility and task selection.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Max Owens

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

ISSN

0001-6918

Abstract

Executive dysfunction in dysphoria and dysphoric rumination is often reflected as a difficulty to alter behaviour in response to task demands and is associated with performance deficits on measures of cognitive flexibility. In the present study, participants were required to switch between two randomly ordered spatial location tasks in which the position of a target within a 2×2 grid was determined according to a horizontal or vertical dimension. The typical congruency effect in task switching was replicated such that interference from a currently irrelevant task was associated with slower and inaccurate responses for a currently relevant task. High-ruminators, compared with low-ruminators, displayed poor filtering of the currently irrelevant task which in turn resulted in a specific task selection deficit, and a tendency to perform the irrelevant task. Results suggest that an impaired ability in selecting the appropriate task promoted application of the most salient task regardless of relevance. Our findings extend previous research linking impaired inhibition of irrelevant information with cognitive inflexibility in dysphoric rumination, and argue for an independent contribution of dysphoric rumination to cognitive deficits observed in dysphoria.

Comments

Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Language

en_US

Publisher

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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