The following is a summary of “Alterations in working memory maintenance of fearful face distractors in depressed participants: An ERP study,” published in the January 2023 issue of Ophthalmology by Ye, et al.

The difficulty of filtering non-threatening negative faces (like sad) from visual working memory (VWM) was unknown. However, it was difficult to filter task-irrelevant threatening faces (like afraid). Potentially, depressive symptoms might interfere with the capacity to distinguish between various emotional expressions. For a study, researchers investigated whether depressed and control participants in a color-change detection task could filter out sad and frightened faces that were extraneous to the task. 

Contralateral delay activity, a particular event-related potential index for the number of items stored in VWM during the maintenance phase, was used to detect the storing of distractions in VWM. The control group did not automatically retain scary face distractions, but they did so for sad face distractions, indicating that threatening faces are particularly challenging for non-depressed people to filter out of VWM. The lack of extra resource consumption for either the distractor condition or the non-distractor condition in depressed individuals may indicate that neither scary nor sad face distractors were kept in the VWM. 

The control group results implied that task-relevant non-threatening negative faces did not automatically load into VWM while also supporting earlier findings of a threat-related filtering challenge in the normal population. The unique result that participants with depressed symptoms did not have any unfavorable distractions in their VWM storage might be explained by a general reduction in response to unpleasant face cues. 

The distractor filtering processes in depressed people should be the subject of future research.

Reference: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2785293