School of Psychology - Dissertation Proposal

Date: Monday, April 30, 2018

Time: 2:00 pm

Location: JS Coon bldg. 150

Advisor:

Paul Verhaeghen, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Dissertation Committee Members:

Randall Engle, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Eric Schumacher, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Susan Embretson, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Jutta Joormann, Ph.D. (Yale)

Title: Dysphoria, Depressive Rumination, and Working Memory

Abstract:

Depression and rumination frequently coincide with inhibitory deficits, especially for negatively valenced emotional material (Goeleven, De Raedt, Baert, and Koster, 2006; Gotlib and McCann, 1984; Joormann, 2004, 2006, 2010; Joormann & Gotlib, 2008; Zetsche and Joormann, 2011).  However, the precise nature of rumination’s relationship with depression remains unclear, as does the precise nature of the attentional deficits that have been observed alongside depression and rumination.  Hubbard, Hutchison, Hambrick, and Rypma (2016) observed “affective transfer” from a modified reading span task with negatively valenced interference cues to a traditional reading span task in individuals with elevated dysphoria.  The proposed study examines whether affective transfer occurs not only in reading span WM tasks but also within the N-back paradigm, as well as whether a dysphoric N-back task can inflict affective transfer upon a non-affective reading span task.  Furthermore, use of the N-back decomposition from Price et al. (2014) should allow a fine-grained analysis of how individual processes in working memory (i.e., updating, forward access, and random access) react with depression and depressive rumination.