Tackling Depression and Anxiety: A Working Memory Intervention
Tackling Depression and Anxiety: A Working Memory Intervention
Anxiety and depression are both associated with impairments in executive functions, including
 working memory (WM) which is needed to maintain and manipulate goal-relevant information. Due
 to these WM impairments anxious and depressed individuals have difficulties inhibiting and
 shifting from irrelevant (negative) information and updating goal relevant information. This
 study explored whether training WM decreases these impairments and reduces clinical symptoms
 and rumination. Eighty-four individuals diagnosed with major depression and forty-nine
 individuals with an anxiety diagnosis executed WM or control tasks three times a week, during
 four weeks. Before, after training and at a two months follow-up measurement depression and
 anxiety symptoms, WM capacity and rumination behaviour were assessed. Training WM did only
 result in a reduction of anxiety symptoms in the depression group. These findings are
 inconsistent with promising results of individual studies showing training WM result in an
 enlarged WM capacity and a decrease of psychopathological symptoms. However, our results are
 in line with recent meta-analyses and reviews which show that WM training do not lead to
 generalized effects and therefore, doubt the clinical relevance of WM training programs.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  Major depression diagnosis

 -  Anxiety disorder diagnosis

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  Current psychosis

 -  Current substance dependency