The impact of happy and angry faces on working memory in depressed adolescents

Recent cognitive models suggest that the ability to control emotional information in working memory (WM) may be implicated in the etiology and maintenance of depression. However, few studies have examined the effects of processing relevant and irrelevant emotional stimuli on WM performance in depressed adolescents. In the current study, depressed adolescents (n = 27) and healthy adolescents (n = 49) completed two versions of an emotional n-back task: a low WM load (0-back) task and a high WM load (2-back) task. In the emotion-relevant condition participants were asked to attend to the emotional expression of an angry, happy, or neutral face, whereas in the emotion-irrelevant condition participants were asked to attend to the gender of the face. The results showed a WM improvement for happy faces in the emotion-relevant condition and a WM impairment for happy faces in the emotion-irrelevant condition for healthy adolescents but not for depressed adolescents. No biases toward angry faces were found. These results demonstrate that depressed adolescents do not show a preferential processing of angry faces but rather fail to show a positivity bias as seen in healthy adolescents. This supports the theoretical notion that a depressive disorder is characterized by a blunted reactivity toward positive information and may provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of youth depression.