The “Brightening” Effect: Reactions to Positive Events in the Daily Lives of Individuals With Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Depressed individuals are less reactive than healthy individuals to positive stimuli in the laboratory, but accumulating evidence suggests that they are more emotionally reactive to positive events in their daily lives. The present study probed the boundaries of this curious “mood brightening” effect and investigated its specificity to major depressive disorder (MDD) vis-à-vis generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), its closest boundary condition. We used ecological momentary assessment to measure reactions to positive events over one week in individuals with MDD (n = 38), GAD (n = 36), comorbid MDD-GAD (n = 38), and no psychopathology (n = 33). Depressed individuals responded to positive events with larger changes in affect, cognition, reported withdrawal (but not approach) behavior, and symptoms than healthy controls. More severe depression assessed before the sampling week predicted greater brightening. Altered reactivity to positive events was relatively specific to MDD when compared with GAD, similar to patterns found for other positive emotional processes. The robustness, scope, and relative specificity of the brightening effect highlights the need to resolve conflicting findings across laboratory and non-laboratory studies to advance understanding of altered reactivity in emotional disorders.     

Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Computerized Cognitive Training on Executive Functions: a Cross-Disciplinary Taxonomy for Classifying Outcome Cognitive Factors

The growing prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders associated with aging and cognitive decline has generated increasing cross-disciplinary interest in non-pharmacological interventions, such as computerized cognitive training (CCT), which may prevent or slow cognitive decline. However, inconsistent findings across meta-analytic reviews in the field suggest a lack of cross-disciplinary consensus and on-going debate regarding the benefits of CCT. We posit that a contributing factor is the lack of a theoretically-based taxonomy of constructs and representative tasks typically used. An integration of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) taxonomy of broad and narrow cognitive factors and the Miyake unity-diversity theory of executive functions (EF) is proposed (CHC-M) as an attempt to clarify this issue through representing and integrating the disciplines contributing to CCT research. The present study assessed the utility of this taxonomy by reanalyzing the Lampit et al. (2014) meta-analysis of CCT in healthy older adults using the CHC-M framework. Results suggest that: 1) substantively different statistical effects are observed when CHC-M is applied to the Lampit et al. meta-analytic review, leading to importantly different interpretations of the data; 2) typically-used classification practices conflate Executive Function (EF) tasks with fluid reasoning (Gf) and retrieval fluency (Gr), and Attention with sensory perception; and 3) there is theoretical and practical advantage in differentiating attention and working-memory tasks into the narrow shifting, inhibition, and updating EF domains. Implications for clinical practice, particularly for our understanding of EF are discussed.     

Imposing Order to See the Disorder: Student Depression and T.S. Eliot’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Waste Land:</Emphasis> A (Mis)reading/Diagnosis

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis.     

The Impact of Analogies on Creative Concept Generation: Lessons From an In Vivo Study in Engineering Design

Research on innovation often highlights analogies from sources outside the current problem domain as a major source of novel concepts; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. We analyzed the temporal interplay between far analogy use and creative concept generation in a professional design team's brainstorming conversations, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps). Surprisingly, we found that concepts were more similar to their preceding concepts after far analogy use compared to baseline situations (i.e., without far analogy use). Yet far analogies increased the team's concept generation rate compared to baseline conditions. Overall, these results challenge the view that far analogies primarily lead to novel concepts via jumps in conceptual spaces and suggest alternative pathways from far analogies to novel concepts (e.g., iterative, deep exploration within a functional space).