Cognitive Control Attenuates Negative Emotional Interference in Subthreshold Depression: The Moderating Role of Rumination

This study aims to investigate the negative inhibitory control deficits in adolescents with subthreshold depression, and to examine the effects of immediate activation of cognitive control through tasks on suppressing negative emotional interference and regulating rumination. The participant screening was conducted by distributing the Depression Scale (CES-D) to public junior high schools in a certain city on a class by class basis, and after removing invalid questionnaires, 1021 valid questionnaires were obtained. The first screening referred to relevant studies (Yang Wenhui&Xiong Ge, 2016) and identified individuals with a CES-D total score of ≥ 24 and a CES-D total score of<29 as meeting the screening criteria. The second screening was conducted by the mental health teacher of the middle school to further screen individuals who met the criteria based on the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) (Zhang Shaohua et al., 2022), and finally 173 middle school students who met the subthreshold depression criteria were selected. After obtaining informed consent from students and their parents, a total of 69 participants were recruited. Among them, 5 subjects were excluded due to high error rates, and the final effective number of subjects was 64. There were 31 subjects in the experimental group (M age=13.34 years, SD=0.60 years, 12 boys, 19 girls) and 33 subjects in the control group (M age=13.27 years, SD=0.76 years, 13 boys, 20 girls). There was no significant difference in depression scores between the experimental group and the control group (M experimental group=26.16, SD=1.42; M control group=25.64, SD=1.37; p > 0.05）。 All subjects have normal or corrected vision, no color vision disorders, no history of mental illness, and no major physical illnesses. The submitted data includes raw data, SPSS data, analysis of variance, and moderation analysis results.