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.