Owens, M. & Derakshan, N.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, London, UK
Executive dysfunction in dysphoria and dysphoric rumination is often reflected as perseverative behaviour, and may result in performance deficits on measures of cognitive flexibility. For the present study participants were required to switch between two randomly ordered spatial location tasks in which the position of a target within a 2x2 grid was determined according to a horizontal or vertical dimension. The congruency effect found in task switching was replicated such that interference from a currently irrelevant task was associated with slower responses and greater selection of the wrong task. Dysphoric ruminators displayed poor filtering of the currently irrelevant task relative to non-ruminators which in turn resulted in a specific task selection deficit, and a bias to perform the easier horizontal task. Results suggest difficulty choosing an appropriate response promoted application of the most salient task regardless of relevance. Our findings extend previous research that have linked impaired inhibition of irrelevant information with cognitive inflexibility in dysphoric rumination, and are discussed in terms of proposals which argue for an independent contribution of dysphoric rumination to cognitive deficits observed in dysphoria.