Recall of neutral words

The goal of the present study was to investigate whether exposing individuals with MDD to negative cues during the encoding stage would lead to deeper cognitive processing and improved memory retention of subsequent information. We hypothesized that in the MDD group, exposure to the negative prime cue would result in better recall of the subsequent word list compared to exposure to the positive prime cue. Furthermore, we predicted that the impact of the emotional prime cue on memory recall would be more pronounced when presented during the encoding stage compared to the retrieval stage. For the encoding condition, in the MDD group we found a significant difference indicating better word recalling for the negative compared to the positive video valance condition. In the HC group there was no significant difference between the two video valence conditions. For the retrieval condition, the results revealed no video valence X group interaction. Consistent with assumptions, individuals with MDD, but not HCs, showed enhanced word recall after exposure to negative, compared to positive, emotional stimuli during encoding. Notably, this effect was not observed when the emotional video was presented during the retrieval stage