Maintaining mechanisms in chronic depression and their changeability: the role of enhanced discrepancy responding
Final Report Abstract
Depression often takes a protracted course. An important factor perpetuating symptoms is the tendency to respond to negative mood with repeated thinking about the causes and consequences of the mood. It has been suggested that as depression enters a chronic course, such ruminative processes become increasingly automatic and overlearned, and can be easily cued by context. From this perspective, the ability to control and monitor thinking processes is likely to be an important factor influencing the course of the disorder and outcome of treatments. This study investigated whether brief training in mindfulness meditation, a mental training including a range of methods that are aimed at cultivating present moment awareness, can increase the magnitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), an evoked potential in the electroencephalogram that occurs following commission of errors and is assumed to reflect individuals’ capacity for cognitive control. ERN was assessed in a sustained attention task that indexes tendencies for attention to move into spontaneous thought. Compared to healthy controls (n = 18), chronically depressed patients (n = 59) showed significantly blunted ERN. Following brief mindfulness training, patients (n = 24) showed significantly increased ERN magnitude while there were no significant changes in patients who had received an active control training (n = 22). However, there was no relation between changes in ERN and changes in behavioral data reflecting cognitive control. Despite differential effects of the mindfulness training on symptoms and ruminative tendencies, there was no relation between these changes and changes in ERN magnitude. These findings suggest that even brief training in mindfulness may effectively increase cognitive control. It remains unclear from our findings, however, in how far these increases contribute to changes in rumination and symptoms.
