How was everyone’s week? I don’t know about you but I feel like the water-wings are off and we are getting thrown into thinking about midterms, choosing essay topics and the like. This has me feeling a little stressed, but I saw this cool study that I think may be of interest to us as students.
Researchers wanted to check out the effects depression on memory and it turns out that people with depressive symptoms have trouble tapping into specific memories. This can negatively impact a person’s ability to solve problems and can lead to a fixation on feelings of distress.
To test this they took a group of young individuals who displayed symptoms of depression and held a memory training program using different types of memory. Participants were given practice recalling specific memories associated with positive, negative and neutral words. After testing both the trained and control groups, those who went through the program showed better memory recall and less depressive symptoms than the control.
Therefore, it can be understood that spending time remembering positive things can have potential benefits in alleviating symptoms of depression. You can check out the whole study here!
For us as students this can be extremely useful; as the semester becomes increasingly intense, it can be helpful to take some time to reflect on people that you care about, things that made you laugh, or events that made you feel happy. Depression can be a perpetual cycle that is difficult to break but this shows that individuals have the power to disrupt those detrimental cognitions and take control over our own mental health.
I suppose the moral of story is that nostalgia can be bliss, and for me nothing is more nostalgic than a certain girl group that couldn’t have said it better. Check out this video hopefully have a giggle and enjoy the rest of your weekend.