Adolescents without depressive symptoms show a bias toward faces with positive emotions - PsyPost

Because of this, the study researchers were interested in assessing working memory in adolescents and adults both with and without depressive symptoms.

“As multiple studies suggest that depressed adults experience greater difficulty in manipulating material in [working memory] compared to healthy comparisons, especially when the material is negative, we hypothesized that when exposed to anger, this would have a bigger influence on [working memory] in those with depressive symptoms,” wrote study author Estíbaliz Royuela-Colomer and colleagues.

“Because adolescents have a heightened reactivity to emotional content, we hypothesized that the influence of affective material would be stronger in adolescents—both healthy and with depressive symptoms—compared with young adults.”.

For adults, results indicate that under low cognitive load reaction times were faster for angry and happy faces whereas under high cognitive load there were no differences in reaction time.

For adolescents with depressive symptoms, no differences in reaction times were observed.

“The most striking result is that, during high [working memory] load, healthy adolescents showed a bias for positive emotions, improving (in valence condition) and impairing (in gender condition) performance, whereas this effect was not present in young adults or adolescents with depressive symptoms,” concluded the researchers.

“In comparison to adolescents, the positivity bias in young adults was absent, which supports recent research that documented a positivity bias in healthy adolescents, but not in healthy adults… Our results might have been influenced by the developmental differences in [working memory], and precisely, a heightened sensitivity to positive affective material in adolescents, which might explain why the positivity bias was not present in young adults during high load.”.

Th study, “Comparing emotional working memory in adolescents and young adults with and without depressive symptoms: developmental and psychopathological differences“, was authored by Estíbaliz Royuela‑Colomer, Laura Wante, Izaskun Orue, Caroline Braet, and Sven C.