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Query: UMLS:C0011570 (depression)
 172,036 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

It is widely accepted that depressives focus on negative memories, and forget or repress positive memories (showing a mood-congruent affective tendency). Normals have an opposite positive bias in memory ('Pollyanna tendency'). Research evidence for depressives' negative bias in memory comes mainly from studies of retrieval of personal experiences during depression, or from studies of such retrieval during induced mood. In the present study, the hypothesis that depressives encode and remember negative emotion materials better than other materials was tested. Contrary to the hypothesis, the results showed that severely depressed patients remembered more positive affect than negative affect words, after a 2-day delay. Depressives' overall memory performance and rate of forgetting were poor, similar to schizophrenics', and worse than normals'. The results suggest that, while memory performance during a depressive episode is poor, the memory consolidation process for affective information is normal. Unlike in schizophrenia, it does not select negative emotion materials. This conclusion is not incongruent with the finding that depressives show mood-congruent retrieval for previously learnt personal (experiential) information. The consolidation of non-personal (nonexperiential) positive affect materials during depression may provide a clue as to the mechanism of recovery in depression, and the lack of such recovery in schizophrenia.
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PMID:Affect and memory in depression: evidence of better delayed recall of positive than negative affect words. 886 10

The present study is part of a series of systematic studies intended to identify simple strategies of picture presentation to improve recall performance in demented subjects. The aims of this design were to examine the effects of elaboration by naming, 4-fold repetition and different inspection times on memory performance. 19 patients with senile dementia of Alzheimer type and 21 control subjects with remitted depression were included. Picture recall was examined using different presentation conditions on 5 consecutive days. The presentation conditions significantly influenced recall performance depending on the diagnosis and on the delay of recall. Naming of pictures did not improve later recall or recognition. In both groups repetition improved memory performance. Shorter presentation times deteriorated immediate and delayed memory performance in comparison with the control condition. Forgetting did not depend on picture inspection times in patients and control. This observation allows the use of different presentation times for further comparisons of interventions in patients and control. Even though we could provide evidence of some minor memory improvements after some interventions, i.e. prolonged inspection time and repetition, we suppose that the cognitive reserve capacity in demented subjects is limited and does not allow major memory improvements.
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PMID:Effect of repetition and inspection times on picture recall in patients with dementia of Alzheimer type. 913 92

Experimental psychopathologists have identified varying patterns in memory bias in people with depressive and anxiety disorders. Individuals suffering from depression tend to exhibit explicit memory deficits for positively-valanced material, and sometimes exhibit biases for retrieving negative self-relevant information as well. Most studies, however, provide scant evidence for implicit memory biases in depression. In contrast to depression, anxiety disorders are rarely associated with enhanced explicit memory for threat-related information (with the exception of panic disorder). Evidence for implicit memory biases for threat in these syndromes is mixed. After providing an overview of findings on memory abnormalities in depressive and anxiety disorders, data from several new studies bearing on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam combat veterans and in women with histories of childhood sexual abuse are presented. Involving directed forgetting, implicit memory and autobiographical cueing paradigms, these experiments point to a pattern of abnormalities linked to PTSD rather than to trauma per se.
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PMID:Memory and anxiety disorders. 941 28

The efficacy of excitatory synapses terminating on cortical and hippocampal pyramidal cells may be persistently depressed as well as potentiated. Homo-synaptic long-term depression (LTD) seems to be triggered by an entry of calcium into a post-synaptic cell less than that needed to initiate long-term potentiation (LTP). Theoretical work predicted, and experimental studies confirmed, that moderate elevations of calcium initiate LTD via a cascade of biochemical interactions involving calcium-dependent phosphatases. Genetically modified animals confirmed the prediction of a sliding threshold that defines the limit between LTD and LTP. While mechanisms for the initiation of LTD are quite well established, it remains unclear whether pre- or post-synaptic mechanisms, or both, are involved in its maintenance. A role for LTD in processes of learning and forgetting in the adult animal remains to be firmly established. It seems probable, however, that a persistent reduction in synaptic weight is a basic process used in the establishment and refinement of neuronal circuits during development.
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PMID:[Long-term depression of excitatory synapses in the cortex and hippocampus]. 975 29

A case is presented that shows verifiable evidence of repression at work. Rachel, a 40-year-old woman with no history of mental illness and ten years of exemplary professional work, recovers memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father through a call from her youth pastor in whom she had confided as an adolescent. This reminder triggered a severe depression, suicidal action, and the need for hospitalization. Rachel's older sister, herself an abuse victim, had witnessed the abuse, yet Rachel had no memory of the events. No apparent causes of false memories are present, so a different mechanism than forgetting must have been at work.
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PMID:A verified case of recovered memories of sexual abuse. 1067 57

Seniors take three times as many drugs as the general population and are the group most vulnerable to the adverse effects of drug therapy. For this reason, it is extremely important that they receive support to help them understand and manage their medications. To highlight the major problems in managing medication, determine the risk factors and prevent overdosing of psychotropic drugs in seniors, the authors carried out a study of 549 senior rural residents living at home. The study findings indicate that 19 per cent of people aged 65 or over take no drugs at all, while 24 per cent have five prescriptions or more. Two thirds of respondents (65.7%) who had only one prescription were well informed about their medication, compared with just 14 per cent of those taking five drugs or more. One quarter (27%) said they never received information about their prescription, while 17.3 per cent reported that the labels on their prescription bottles were useless because the print was too small, too pale or because they could not read them. Close to half the respondents (42.6%) reported occasionally forgetting whether they had taken their medication. The findings also indicate that the respondents' sex, their perception of their personal state of health, the population density, and the depression index are all major variables that significantly relate to use of psychotropic drugs. All of the findings identify the specific needs of seniors and suggest a focus for nursing intervention.
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PMID:[Overuse of psychotropic drugs in seniors]. 1063 73

This essay on the effects of modern effective contraception on psychological and sexual behavior concentrates on the characteristis of French society. Contraception is obviously a weapon against multiple illegal abortons, and a means for professional, social and sexual liberation of women. For physicians it provides a medium of interacting for the first time with the sexual life of patients, sometimes resulting in spectacular cures of psychosomatic disorders such as pelvic pain, menometrorrhagia, depression and anxiety. The opportunity for more frequent sexual relations, free of fear of pregnancy, may permit the release of orgasm and an experience of new sensation, authenticity and confidence for the woman. But contraception may also reveal or aggravate sexual dysfunction and participate in the deterioration of sexual adjustment. The physician must be aware of patients' prior psychosexual situation in order not to make contraception a scapegoat for so-called pill or IUD side effects. This requires sound medical training and a good doctor-patient relationship. For many young women maternity is the sign of womanhood, and for mature women and their partners, fertility is the essence of feminine attraction. This unconscious belief is often the basis for forgetting pills, frigidity, impotence and masochistic pregnancy. Children are unconsciously the bridge toward immortality.
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PMID:[Influence of contraception on psychology and sexual life]. 1230 76

This survey of attitudes toward contraception is taken from a document concerning psychological aspects of 233 women seeking pregnancy terminations. 87.12% had utilized a method of contraception at some time, of which 66.5% had used pills, 29.6% had used natural methods, 23.6% had used local methods, and 11.16% had used IUDs. 33.47% of the total sample had refused pills, in 83.65% of cases because of fears for health, and in the remainder because of infrequent intercourse, fears for unborn children, lack of information, belief that women shouldn't be responsible for contraception, or fear of forgetting. 64.38% of the women in the total sample had discontinued use of pills, about 2/3 of them for personal reasons such as nervousness, changes in the relationship, nausea, menstrual changes, frigidity, and depression, which are difficult to evaluate objectively. In most cases of termination of pill use for external reasons, the cause was opposition by the physician. Personality traits of the sample women which could impede responsible fertility control included passivity and inconsistency in 16.47%, dependency in 47.64%, and immaturity and poorly structured personality in 40.34%. Personality disorders among the latter included enjoyment of risk, impulsivity and lack of capacity to anticipate, emotional instability, and significant egocentrism and narcissism. 21.89% had depressive tendencies, 22.75% had sadomasochistic tendencies, and 28.33% had tendencies toward somatization, each of which is often correlated with unconscious choice. The unconscious elements are often more significant than the conscious and apparent motives. More effective contraception and a prevention of abortions might result from making women aware of their unconscious motivations.
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PMID:[Dependable fertility control: hazards and barriers (author's transl)]. 1233 50

A class of adaptive resonance theory (ART) models for learning, recognition, and prediction with arbitrarily distributed code representations is introduced. Distributed ART neural networks combine the stable fast learning capabilities of winner-take-all ART systems with the noise tolerance and code compression capabilities of multilayer perceptrons. With a winner-take-all code, the unsupervised model dART reduces to fuzzy ART and the supervised model dARTMAP reduces to fuzzy ARTMAP. With a distributed code, these networks automatically apportion learned changes according to the degree of activation of each coding node, which permits fast as well as slow learning without catastrophic forgetting. Distributed ART models replace the traditional neural network path weight with a dynamic weight equal to the rectified difference between coding node activation and an adaptive threshold. Thresholds increase monotonically during learning according to a principle of atrophy due to disuse. However, monotonic change at the synaptic level manifests itself as bidirectional change at the dynamic level, where the result of adaptation resembles long-term potentiation (LTP) for single-pulse or low frequency test inputs but can resemble long-term depression (LTD) for higher frequency test inputs. This paradoxical behavior is traced to dual computational properties of phasic and tonic coding signal components. A parallel distributed match-reset-search process also helps stabilize memory. Without the match-reset-search system, dART becomes a type of distributed competitive learning network.
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PMID:Distributed Learning, Recognition, and Prediction by ART and ARTMAP Neural Networks. 1266 88

A 10-item scale to measure memory self-efficacy was developed from responses to the 33-item Frequency of Forgetting scale of the Memory Functioning Questionnaire (MFQ). Responses to the MFQ from 565 participants in the 1994-1995 wave of the Long Beach Longitudinal Study were analyzed. Rasch scaling procedures were used to select items that discriminated individuals' scoring patterns and that provided non-redundant information about responses. A set of 10 items provided a scale that was reliable across items and persons. Female gender, conscientiousness score, depression score, and list recall predicted individual differences in participants' scores on the scale. Age, education, neuroticism, and text recall were also reliably correlated with scores but were suppressed by the other covariates. The shortened test is predicted by the same covariates as the long version, indicating that it has similar construct validity.
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PMID:A 10-item Rasch modeled memory self-efficacy scale. 1537 46


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