BACKGROUND According to cognitive diathesis-stress theories, a latent cognitive vulnerability to depression is activated by negative affect in individuals at risk for depressive relapse. This vulnerability can manifest as mood-congruent memory during sad mood and may involve amygdala response, which is implicated in memory for emotionally arousing stimuli. This study examined whether amygdala m...

Recent evidence suggests that affect acts as modulator of cognitive processes and in particular that induced mood has an effect on the way semantic memory is used on-line. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine affective modulation of semantic information processing under three different moods: neutral, positive and negative. Fifteen subjects read 324 pairs of sentences, after mood ...

Executive functions play an important role in problem-solving and self-control. Set-shifting is an aspect of executive functioning and represents cognitive flexibility. The inability to control eating in Binge Eating Disorder (BED) may imply deficits in set-shifting which could be exacerbated by negative mood and depressive symptoms. The aim of the study was to test whether there is a causal re...

Frontal EEG activity is thought to reflect affective dispositions, but may also reflect the emotional demands of a specific context combined with the capability to regulate emotions in that context. The present study examined this hypothesis by testing whether frontal EEG activity during mood inductions versus a resting baseline predicted emotion regulation. EEG was recorded while participants ...

One can exert significant volitional control over the attentional filter so that stimuli that are consistent with one's explicit goals are more likely to receive attention and become part of one's conscious experience. Here we pair a mood induction procedure with an inattentional blindness task to show that one's current mood has a similar influence on attention. A positive, negative, or neutra...

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 METHOD 9 Participants Measures Stimuli Procedure RESULTS 15 Mood Induction Mood Reactivity & Recovery Attentional Bias Bias for sad stimuli Bias for happy stimuli Mood reactivity as a moderator Bias for sad faces Bias for happy faces Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation as a mediator Emotion regulation processes and mood reactivity and...

We investigate how mood inductions impact the neural processing of emotional adjectives in one’s first language (L1) and a formally acquired second (L2). Twenty-three student participants took part an EEG experiment with two separate sessions. Happy or sad were followed by series individually presented positive, negative, neutral L1 (German) L2 (English) evaluative decisions had to be performed...

Many studies have revealed mood induced changes in the cognitive processing of different tasks. Recent studies show that negative moods lead to a switch in the style of processing while positive moods lead to a continuation of the preferred style of processing. Two of the centers responsible for mood regulations also play a big role in modulating different patterns of locus coeruleus norepineph...

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) to emotional and neutral cue words appears to be a stable cognitive marker of clinical depression. For example, reduced AMS is present in remitted/recovered depressed patients and shows no reliable relationship with current levels of depressed mood in correlational studies. The present study examined whether reduced AMS could be induced in healt...