The Positive Effect of Negative Stimuli: Exposure to Negative Emotional Stimuli Improves Mood in Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder

Background: Cognitive biases in information processing, particularly attentional and memory biases, play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). These biases lead individuals with MDD to preferentially attend to and remember negative information, thereby maintaining a depressed mood. A recently proposed attentional resources model suggests that exposure to negative stimuli leads to deeper cognitive processing of subsequent information, regardless of its content. Based on this model, the current study investigated a novel paradigm that manipulated exposure to negative emotional stimuli and examined its effect on information processing and mood improvement. Method: Thirty-eight unmedicated participants with MDD and no comorbid disorders, and 37 healthy controls, completed three blocks of an emotional recall task, which involved watching a short emotional video followed by a recall task of neutral or positive valence stories. Mood changes were assessed throughout the task. Results: Results revealed that both the MDD and HC groups reported improved mood after exposure to a negative emotional video followed by a positive story. Conclusions: These results have important clinical implications. The paradigm may be applied in a broader sense as an active tool that may help to improve mood in depression treatment.