Читать книгу The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster - Tracy Alloway - Страница 49

At the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to investigate how working memory is related to unhappiness, in particular, depression and rumination. Rumination is the term psychologists use when people fixate on things, often negative. It is an unproductive style of thinking that is difficult to control or stop, and it tends to be linked with strong emotions like worry and fear. It is like your working memory Conductor is playing the same sad song over and over again.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale University, has been investigating rumination for more than a decade, and her research indicates that people who ruminate are more likely to develop depression; moreover, they experience more severe symptoms of depression. We wondered what effect rumination might have on working memory and discovered that emerging evidence suggests a relationship. Robert Hester and Hugh Garavan of Dublin’s Trinity College artificially increased rumination on negative thoughts by showing adults lists of words with negative connotations like murder, anger, and fight. They found that rumination not only made people more depressed but also impaired their working memory.

In a related 2008 study, psychologists Jutta Joorman and Ian Gotlib gave two groups of people a task that required them to update information continually in their working memory, as well as trying to inhibit words with negative connotations. One group of participants was suffering from depression and the other was not. They found that the depressed individuals had more difficulty in not mulling over negative words, which inhibited their working memory.

We wanted to investigate these links ourselves, so we spent three months researching a group of more than one hundred twenty-somethings. We chose people in their twenties because these are the years in which people tend to move out of their parents’ home, make new friends, and explore new ideas, and though this transition into adulthood can be exciting, it can also be a stressful time and result in a sense of feeling overwhelmed and even depressed. Because this age group faces so many challenges to their happiness, they presented a good opportunity for us to explore how working memory helps us to manage our emotions and stay positive.

The twenty-somethings in our study performed several cognitive tasks. First, they completed a working memory task from Tracy’s Alloway Working Memory Assessment (AWMA). We asked them questions such as, “Oranges live in water. True or false?” and then asked them to repeat the last word of the statement. Questions like this engage working memory because the brain is forced to hold the sentence in mind and decide if it’s a true statement while repeating the last word. We then divided the participants into those with strong and weak working memory.

We also asked these young adults to complete questionnaires often used in hospitals and clinics to provide an objective measure of depression. This required participants to rate statements depending on how strongly they felt each applied to them during the past week. Some statements expressed negative feelings such as, “I was bothered by things that don’t usually bother me.” Others expressed positive feelings such as, “I felt hopeful about the future.” Based on their responses, we determined whether they were depressed. We also measured their tendency for rumination using a similar questionnaire.

We had hypothesized that ruminators and depressed participants would have relatively poor working memory and that ruminators would be depressed. But when we analyzed the working memory scores, depression status, and propensity for rumination among the young adults, we made some very surprising findings: not all of the ruminators had low working memory scores, and not all ruminators were depressed. The ruminators who had good working memory were less likely to suffer depression compared to the ruminators who had poor working memory. Our interpretation is that though their working memory Conductor plays the same song, it is also strong enough to inhibit the negative emotions associated with depression.