Browsing by Subject "prefrontaalikorteksi"

Objective. Executive functions are involved in regulating human behavior and thinking. They are based on three core functions: inhibition, working memory and cognitive flexibility. Inhibition suppresses automatic and harmful responses, working memory manages information held in mind, and cognitive flexibility is needed when adjusting one’s behaviour to fit the current situation. Many psychiatric ilnesses are associated with deficits in executive functions, and it has been proposed that poor executive functioning might be a transdiagnostic risk factor for mental disorders. Depression is characterized by biased information processing and difficulties with emotion regulation, which in turn are associated with both onset and maintenance of the disease. The aim of this literature rewiev is to examine executive function deficits related to depression, the relationships between these deficits and emotion regulation, and possible brain abnormalities associated with impaired execuive functioning and emotion regulation difficulties found in patients with major depression. Methods. Studies were collected from PsycINFO-, PubMed-, Medline- and Google Scholar- databases. The headwords used were ”major depression” paired with ”executive function”, ”cognitive impairment”, ”inhibition”, ”working memory”, ”updating”, ”cognitive flexibility”, ”set shifting”, and ”emotion regulation”. Neural correlates were searched by adding the term ”neural correlates” to the previous searches. Results and conclusion. Studies presented in this rewiev found that patients with depression had poorer performance in tasks used to measure executive functions compared to healthy controls. Deficits were evident in all of the three core functions, but deficits in inhibition seemed to be greater than deficits in other processes. Performance in tasks requiring emotional processing was also impaired, and poor executive functioning correlated with the use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Brain imaging studies found that depressed patients exhibited less activation in brain areas associated with cognitive control. These results support the idea that depression is associated with deficits in executive functions, and these deficits are also involved in emotion regulation difficulties. Most of the studies rewieved were cross-sectional, so conclusions about causal relations cannot be made.