Abstract
Past research has found that depression is associated with a multitude of deficits in processing social stimuli. These deficits might impair the implicit (unconscious) learning of socio-emotional regularities, an essential process for adaptive social functioning. In contrast, previous research on adaptive functions of depression suggests that dysphoric states can be associated, in some circumstances, with increased accuracy in detecting regularities. However, a direct assessment of implicit learning of socio-emotional regularities in depression has not yet been conducted.
In the present studies, we adapted the Artificial Grammar Learning task to induce implicit and explicit learning of regularities that govern social emotional stimuli (facial emotional expressions in Experiment 1) and social stimuli without explicit emotional content (body movements in Experiment 2). We assessed participants’ learning and awareness of these regularities, as well as their levels of depression. In both experiments, Bayesian analyses showed that the depressive symptomatology was neither associated with a learning deficit, nor with a learning advantage. This was the case for participants’ overall performance, as well as for their implicit and their explicit learning performance.
Our results contradict most previous findings and show that, even though depressive symptoms are associated with a variety of socio-cognitive deficits, they do not hinder the ability to implicitly or explicitly learn regularities within social contexts. Our results also show some constraints on the types of abilities that can be enhanced by depressive states.
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Notes
The guidelines of the Babeș-Bolyai University’s Research Review Board exempt the present study from review and approval by the Board, as it was part of the first author’s doctoral research. In these cases, the student and their supervisor are responsible for ensuring compliance with the relevant national and international ethical guidelines in the field.
Of course, as long as the alternative hypotheses make different predictions regarding how the data will look like. For a rationale, see the section “The answer to the question should depend on the question” in Dienes & Mclatchie 2018; see Ziori & Dienes 2015, for an example of AGL study that tested two alternative hypotheses on the same data.
Age and gender were introduced as covariates because, in preliminary correlations, we found that age was positively related with participants’ overall accuracy and with their implicit accuracy in Experiment 1. Gender was also related to participants’ conscious performance in experiment 2 (i.e., men performed better) and with the proportion of implicit responses in experiment 1 (i.e., women used more implicit responses). For brevity, we do not report these relations separately as correlations, because age and gender emerge as significant predictors in the regression analyses that we report.
The Bayes factors (B) for the analyses reported in this section were computed using a normal prior distribution, with the mean equal to the overall learning effect obtained with the most similar AGL task used in a previous study (i.e., 6% in Ziori & Dienes 2015) and the SD = mean/2.
For each combination they also responded to an additional awareness scale that was relevant for the objectives of the original study and that is not discussed further.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Sorina Florea and Ioana Mesterelu for their assistance with the data collection; to Dr. Zoltan Dienes for advice and feedback on the Bayesian analytical approach; and to Dr. Nim Tottenham for granting the permission to use the NimStim database. R.J. was supported by a Post-Doctoral research grant awarded by Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, and Development of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research (PN-III-P1-1.1- PD-2019-0975). A. O., R. J., and A.C. were supported by an Experimental-Demonstrative Project grant awarded by the Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, and Development of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research (PN-III-P2–2.1-PED-2019-4599).
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Jurchis, R., Costea, A. & Opre, A. Implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information are not related to the level of depressive symptomatology. Motiv Emot 47, 795–809 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10022-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10022-5