The Effect of Depression on a Lexical Decision Task

Sixteen depressed and sixteen non-depressed college aged participants completed a lexical decision task containing cognitive triad word - negative word pairs, cognitive triad word - positive word pairs, cognitive triad word - nonword pairs, categorically related pairs, neutral word - neutral word pairs, and neutral word - nonword pairs. Following the lexical decision task, the participants performed a surprise recall task. The depressed participants were expected to recognize the negative words as words more quickly than the positive words and recall a higher percentage of negative words than positive words. These results were not found. All participants responded to the negative, positive, and categorical words more quickly than to the neutral words and recalled approximately the same percentage of negative and positive words. Due to the lack of the expected effect of shorter reaction time for words than nonwords the depressed group\u27s data are ambiguous and difficult to interpret. The recall data similarly shows no significant difference in recall of the negative and positive words for either group. Possible explanations for the results and suggestions for future research are discussed