How Does Depression Affect Work Memory?

As a result, the brain has difficulty performing mental functions such as thinking and remembering.

People rely on incoming information and stored information to perform their everyday functions. However, humans have a natural capacity of how much information they can attain. We are unable to store all of our acquired information without different systems that organize our information. Working memory is one of these systems that temporarily holds and manages information for cognitive processing (119). Baddeley’s working memory model is made up of four components that allow for temporary information to be stored (109).

    To begin, depression is a psychotic disorder marked by sadness, difficulty thinking and concentrating.Depression is an essential factor because if you have this disorder while you’re

Depression can affect people ability to work by decreasing their productivity and lack of cooperation. Their mind will be on whatever making them feel depressed and it will make it difficult for them to concentrate on their work. This could lead to mistakes that can make a person lose their job. Depressed people like to isolate themselves which makes them want to miss work so they can be alone. Then they will start to show up to work or school late or call in sick and miss many days. This will cause you to get fired or fail your classes which will cause more problems.

When you can not concentrate or remember details when depressed is because your brain’s processing speed becomes impaired. This affects how you process and retrieve memories. In fact, researchers believe it damages a process called ‘pattern separation’, which is your ability to differ enate things that are similar.

demonstrates cognitive impairment. Knowing the differences between Delirium, Dementia, and Depression can be helpful in recognizing cognitive impairment in older adults. Delirium is reversible and requires prompt treatment because it can be caused by potentially life threatening conditions. A patient suffering from delirium can easily be mistaken with mental illness because they can also display symptoms such as hallucinations, delusion, and agitation. The difference of delirium and dementia is the fluctuation of their level of consciousness. A patient with delirium will be in and out from awake, alert, sleepy, and agitation. However, with dementia the patient will have impaired memory, but will not abruptly go in and out of consciousness

This paper explores the symptoms associated with bipolar disorder and the effect of bipolar disorder on work performance. Several articles were explored to define bipolar disorder and the disorder’s impact on work performance, the employer’s response and the vocational rehabilitative field response.

Working memory refers to one’s ability to complete immediate tasks through the use of short-term memory and precision to make actively conscious choices. This is especially important in one’s organizational ability, reasoning, and decision-making. Unfortunately, working memory is yet another function of your brain that only gets weaker as you age into your midlife years. If you’ve ever placed a soup can in the wrong cabinet drawer, or put on non-matching socks or shoes, then you know exactly what it feels like.

Poor memory, lack of concentration, and inability to focus have become such common complaints, they're practically considered "normal". Despite the fact that we're living in the 21st century, where access to higher education and modern medicine is widely available, our brains no longer seem to be keeping up.

Loosli, Rahm, Unterrainer, Weiller, and Kaller (2013) conducted a study investigating life span development of item-specific proactive interference in individual’s working memory. Postle, Brush, and Nick (2004) found that proactive interference is previous important information in working memory (as cited in Loosli et al., 2013). Baddeley (1997) found that working memory is the power to maintain information for a short period of time and manipulate the information (as cited in Loosli et al., 2013). There are two types of proactive interference; the first one being item-nonspecific proactive interference. This type is when someone remembers information while performing another task that is no longer relevant to the current task they are performing.

For example, Ryan opened up only the mail that seemed relevant at the time and put others aside. However, the mail put aside was forgotten about. His mom about 5 months later discovered the unopened mail was very important and some needed an asap response. Thus, Ryan does seem to have some sort of difficulty than others with understand what is relevant, and remembering to get back to things. There has also been research conducted on the frontal lobes function in processing relevant and irrelevant information.

We will assess distraction in a novel version of a complex working memory span task, where we can manipulate the type of distraction and working memory load independently. In this task, participants are asked to memorize a list of letters, which are presented interleaved with trials of a different task.5 For this intervening task, we will use a lexical decision paradigm, in which participants have to decide whether presented letter strings are words or non-words. By manipulating the words, we can induce specific types of distraction, where worry/rumination can be induced with words to provide an ego-threat.

Depression can affect how a person behaves. It can turn you into someone you never imagined yourself to be. It can make you do activities you would never imagine doing. I can honestly say that I'm not 100% sure of who I am as you never know with every separate bout of depression or anxiety, what personality changes come with it. It can make you very distant and make you feel that you don't care about anything and anyone. And then just make you feel guilty about it and feel even worse. From a social person, you can become completely alone, because you cut people from your life as you cannot pretend that you are happy and everything is ok. Pretending is just too exhausting. You might also cut then because you don't want to bring them down with

Working memory is a cognitive system that maintains and manipulates task-relevant information for a short period of time. (Cowan, J. 1999) Memory plays a crucial role in everyday life. It enables one to effectively perform complex tasks such as the ability to reason and solve new problems independently on a daily basis. Working memory is limited in capacity and sensitive to interruptions. “Without memory, our awareness would be confined to an external present and our lives would be virtually devoid of meaning.” (Schacter,D..L and Scarry,E 2001) Impairments in working memory are often apparent in individuals with ADHD, acquired brain injury, depression and several other conditions. It is important that researchers grasp an in-depth understanding of what working memory is and how it works in order to develop interventions and ways to improve working memory. Recent research has revealed that working memory can be enhanced through Cogmed Working Memory Training. (Söderqvist,S. and Nutley, S. 2015) This essay will focus predominantly on Baddeley’s working memory model. It will outline the constituents of the model, drawing upon evidence for and against the model. Atkinsons and Shiffrin’s multistore model of memory will be briefly mentioned. However, it is apparent that this model lacked detail and is outdated.

Strategies and devices that help us remember information that requires effortful processing are: encoding its meaning, visualizing, and mentally organizing the