Reliving negative events, depression link

People who don't recover from negative events may get stuck and relive what happened to them over and over, resulting in depression, U.S. researchers say. Jutta Joormann of the University of Miami, as well as Sara Levens and Ian H. Gotlib, both of Stanford University, say people with depression might have a problem with working memory the thoughts a person keeps active in the mind. Joormann and colleagues recruited 26 people with depression and 27 people who had never had depression. Each person sat in front of a computer and was shown three words, one at a time for a second each, and then they were told to remember the words in the order in which they were presented or in reverse order. The computer presented one of the words and the participants were supposed to respond quickly as they could name the first, second or third in the list. The faster they were able to give a correct answer, the better they were at thinking flexibly. People with depression had trouble re-ordering the words and if they were asked to remember the words in reverse order, they took longer to give the correct answer. The study subjects had a particularly hard time if the words had negative connotations, like death or sadness, the study says. The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, may point toward a way to help people with depression by training them to turn their minds away from negative thoughts.