Depression can damage your memory

New York: Once they enter memory, depressive thoughts can linger for long in affected people, and this extended duration may reduce the amount of information that these individuals can remember, suggests new research.

The findings have far-reaching implications for understanding how depression damages memory, as well as how depression develops and persists over the course of an individual's lifetime.

For the study, researchers recruited 75 university undergraduate students; thirty students were classified as having depressive symptoms and 45 participants were categorised as not exhibiting depressive symptoms.

All participants were asked to respond to a sentence featuring depressive thoughts, such as "I am sad," or "People don't like me," or neutral information. They were then asked to remember a string of numbers.

Individuals with depressed mood forgot more number strings than people without depressed mood when responding to a sentence with negative information.