Trial reportJournal of affective disorders2020
Effects of working memory training on cognitive, affective, and biological responses to stress in major depression: A novel cognitive bias modification protocol.
Trial report in Journal of affective disorders, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of working memory training on depressive symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.Translational psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- Does Emotional Working Memory Training Ameliorate Anxiety and Depression? A Meta-Analytic Review.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Association between homocysteine levels and cognition in late-life depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Negative rumination in depression subtypes with melancholic features and anxious distress.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Meaning-Centred Coping Predicted Lower Depressive Symptoms among Caregivers with Complicated Grief.The Malaysian journal of medical sciences : MJMS · 2024Article
- Hippocampal subfield morphology from first episodes of bipolar disorder type II and major depressive disorder in a drug naïve Chinese cohort.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Affective working memory in depression.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2023Article
- Attentional Biases and their Push and Pull with Rumination and Co-Rumination is Based on Depressive Symptoms: a Prospective Study of Adolescents.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2023Article
- Examining the synergistic effects of a cognitive control video game and a home-based, self-administered non-invasive brain stimulation on alleviating depression: the DiSCoVeR trial protocol.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2023Article
- Effectiveness of memory bias modification in reducing depression and rumination symptoms and autobiographical memory bias: a pilot study.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- The Potential for Outdoor Nature-Based Interventions in the Treatment and Prevention of Depression.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Forgiveness Mediates the Relationship Between Middle Frontal Gyrus Volume and Clinical Symptoms in Adolescents.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Working memory training efficacy in COPD: the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Cogtrain trial.ERJ open research · 2021Article
- Cognitive Control and Ruminative Responses to Stress: Understanding the Different Facets of Cognitive Control.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- From Stress to Depression: Bringing Together Cognitive and Biological Science.Current directions in psychological science · 2020Article
- Predicting Late Adolescent Anxiety From Early Adolescent Environmental Stress Exposure: Cognitive Control as Mediator.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundOver 320 million individuals are living with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), a leading cause of disability worldwide. Thus, there is a crucial need to identify processes that contribute to the maintenance of depressive episodes. Difficulty removing negative information from working memory (WM) is posited to exacerbate affective, cognitive, and biological dysregulation in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), but this has not yet been tested empirically.
methodsIn this study we examined whether training depressed individuals to remove negative information from WM (RNI training) would reduce symptoms of depression and levels of rumination, and would be associated with attenuated biological responsivity to stress. Individuals diagnosed with MDD were randomly assigned to complete Real-RNI training or Sham-RNI training for six days.
resultsAcross conditions, participants exhibited significant improvements from pre- to post-training in removing negative information from WM, symptoms of depression, and rumination. Furthermore, participants in the Real-RNI condition showed a more attenuated pattern of cortisol and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) responses to stress than did participants in the Sham-RNI training condition. LIMITATIONS: We did not assess the long-term effects of training. It will be important for future research to examine whether the documented training-related effects persist across time.
conclusionsThis study is the first to examine the effects of RNI training on clinical symptoms and biological responses to stress in MDD, and it provides experimental evidence that training individuals with depression to remove negative information from WM can help to modulate the heightened biological responses to stress seen in depression.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.