Restoring Effortful Control and Impediments to Doing So

If effortful cognitive control among depressed persons is poor, how can it be enhanced? Beevers (2005) pointed out that much of cognitive therapy involves training the person to use effortful and rule-based processing to identify and correct underlying negative biases. Although it is common to think of cognitive therapy as being a simple self-corrective process, it has always been clear that more is involved than merely providing positive self-statements. The two-mode view provides a good context for understanding effects of that intervention (cf. Daw et al., 2005). The intervention is, in effect, an attempt to restore effortful management of what is currently automatic behavior (see also Wood & Neal, 2007). This view helps account for the fact that cognitive therapy is a substantially more arduous process than one might initially assume (cf. Strunk, DeRubeis, Chiu, & Alvarez, 2007). There is evidence that it is possible to increase working memory capacity (Friedman et al., 2008; Olesen, Westerberg, & Klingberg, 2004), and it may be that such changes themselves are an outcome of cognitive therapy techniques.

Even if a person with depression tries to use such corrective processes, there are reasons why their implementation may fail. For one, the person must have the attentional capacity to do so (Barrett et al., 2004). Evidence suggests that persons with depression do not easily deploy effortful control. If the person’s cognitive resources are stretched thin and thus unavailable, the correction is even less likely to take place.

Ironically, one thing that can deplete cognitive resources is negative affect. Thus, the emotional distress experienced in depression can help create the very conditions that make it difficult to counter further negative implicit processing. Beevers (2005) noted that even when an effortful correction is attempted, it may be insufficient. He further reasoned that a downward spiral may be induced, as cognitive resources are stretched by the need to counter negative thoughts. Indeed, there is evidence that the attempt to suppress or inhibit information attaches negative valence to that information (Fenske & Raymond, 2006).

Consistent with that reasoning, Wenzlaff and Bates (1998) have shown that diminished working memory capacity (induced by a cognitive load) led depressed persons to display more negative bias on a scrambled sentence task. Intriguingly, negativity under cognitive load was a better predictor of depressive symptoms over time than was negativity without cognitive load. Hence, the cognitive resources available to correct implicit biases may be particularly important for the course of depressive symptoms.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14