Construct accessibility and clinical depression: A longitudinal investigation.

There is a rapidly growing body of literature that examines the role of cognitive processes in the etiology and maintenance of depression. In general, empirical support for the causal aspects of cognitive models of depression has been mixed. This study was designed to examine construct accessibility in depressed patients both during and following their hospitalization. Depressed psychiatric patients and nondepressed controls participated twice in a modified Stroop task, naming the colors of tachistoscopically presented depressed-, neutral-, and manic-content words. In addition, a cognitive priming procedure designed to temporarily alter the differential accessibility of the subjects to the three categories of words was assessed. As predicted, the depressed patients took longer to name the colors of the depressed-content than the nondepressed-content words. This effect, however, was obtained only for the hospitalization session, when the patients were clinically depressed; no significant group differences were obtained for the discharge session, when the patients had improved symptomatically. These results suggest that patterns of cognitive functioning hypothesized by cognitive theorists to be implicated in the etiology of depression vary with recovery from depression. Finally, there was no evidence that priming effectively alters either the negative construct accessibility or the affective state of depressed patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)