IndexIntroductionLiterature reviewConclusionIntroductionDepression is an illness that can affect all aspects of daily life due to its negative impact on thoughts, emotions, energy level and focus article, working memory. Depression can have many causes, including stress generated by demanding work and other common life activities, difficult family situations and events, hormones, genetic factors, drug and alcohol use, as well as personal losses and resulting grief. Working memory briefly stores information that can be of immediate use during our waking hours. All of us, regardless of age, use working memory to carry out routine daily tasks. For example, a student uses working memory to complete a long division problem. A cook needs working memory to prioritize and correctly mix the ingredients of a recipe. Depression, however, can have a significantly detrimental impact on the working memory needed for these tasks, diverting our attention to negative thoughts and emotions, often unrelated to what we are trying to do. This article will review research on the effects depression has on working memory and propose research that would evaluate its specific impact on the working memory of children who experience bullying at school. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Literature Review Greenwald and Carr (2018) studied the relationship between anxiety, depression, learning problems, and attention problems by administering a series of tests. The researchers predicted that anxiety and depression scale scores on the Behavioral Assessment System for Children-Second Edition (BASC-II) and the Teacher Rating Scales (TRS) would have a negative correlation with working memory and IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children- Fourth Edition (WISC-IV). Questionnaires were completed by children, teachers, parents/guardians and school psychologists. Follow-up tests assessed externalizing problems, internalizing problems, academic problems, and adaptive skills. Greenwald and Carr found that learning problems were a significant factor in working memory scores. However, as learning impairment scores increased, working memory performance scores decreased. The researchers' hypothesis was deemed correct because scores of anxiety, depression, learning problems, and attention problems did not have a negative relationship with IQ scores. Another term for experiencing mental distress or feelings of anxiety or misery is dysphoria. Dysphoric individuals are known to have deficits in working memory compared to individuals without dysphoria when depressive symptoms are present. Hubbard, Hutchison, Hambrick, and Rypma (2015) investigated whether a working memory task with depressive symptoms can result in decreased performance on a subsequent working memory task without depressive symptoms for dysphoric individuals compared to non-dysphoric individuals. They hypothesized that individuals with dysphoria in a working memory task and a reading span task would perform worse on the reading span task than individuals with dysphoria in the reading span task and in the memory task condition. of work and to non-dysphoric individuals in both conditions. Participants were asked to complete a reading span task and aeffective working memory task one after another to assess whether or not receiving the effective working memory task could influence performance on reading span tasks for dysphoric individuals compared to non-dysphoric individuals. Next, participants had to complete another series of tests. Tests included a Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Inventory, Ruminative Responses Scale, Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, Effective Working Memory Task, and Reading Span Task. The researchers found that the results supported their hypothesis. Individuals with dysphoria responded more depressively than individuals without dysphoria. Furthermore, the results also showed that individuals with dysphoria scored lower on working memory tasks than people without dysphoria. Zhang, Xie, He, Wei, and Gu (2018) studied working memory updating on positive, negative, and neutral levels in patients suffering from depression using the 2-back task. Using the 2-back task, researchers studied working memory of emotional words in depression. However, since this was a pilot study, no specific hypothesis was put forward. Participants were divided into two groups, depressed patients and non-depressive patients. A word would be presented to participants for eight hundred milliseconds in each trial. Participants were then asked to indicate whether the current word matched another word presented two trials earlier. The researchers found that participants with depression had a lower rate and longer response time for identifying positive words than participants who did not suffer from depression. Furthermore, people with depression showed low sensitivity to positive stimuli; this means they pay less attention to positive material and have more difficulty remembering positive events in their life. To extend the study, Li, Lu, Wang, and Zhong (2015) studied the difference between emotional working memory and emotional experiences in men. and female participants suffering from depression. Since there are many studies on the effects of sex hormones between males and females, researchers wanted to study the cognitive differences between males and females suffering from depression. The researchers predicted that female emotional working memory would score higher than male emotional working memory. The study used images of positive, negative and neutral emotions to examine mood and emotional working memory. During the experiment, images appeared for one hundred thousand milliseconds to allow participants to remember all the images that were presented. This was followed by a memory retention time of five thousand milliseconds. Next, participants were presented with another image and asked to respond whether the image had appeared in the previous trial. As expected, the researchers found that both genders suffering from depression have memory effects on mood congruence; meaning they remember the only information consistent with their particular mood. Furthermore, the researchers found that participants with a negative emotional state remembered more negative information than positive information, which led to the conclusion that both sexes' working memory for negative emotions was superior to that for positive emotions. Overall, the researchers concluded that there were no significant differences in emotional working memory among participants with depression. However, women's level of emotional experience turned out to be higher than menmen. Christopher and MacDonald (2005) studied the impact of depression on working memory performance and examined which components were affected. The main questions the researchers asked were: "Is there a deterioration of working memory in depression and what elements does it affect? ​​Is another important clinical group also affected and in what way?" normal?" (Christopher et al., 2005). The researchers hypothesized that there would be a greater difference between the performance of the depressed and non-depressed groups in working memory. They also hypothesized that the depressed participants' performance would be more impaired in single-task conditions compared to the other group. Finally, the researchers hypothesized that the performance gap between the depressed group and the two comparison groups would decrease as the difficulty of the task increased (Christopher et al., 2005). were asked to complete a set of questionnaires to measure general abilities. Next, participants were asked to complete a subset of tasks. These sets consisted of phonological similarity effect, grid recognition, backward letter extension, effect of word length, consonant trigrams, current memory and verbal reasoning. However, during these tasks, the researchers also monitored the participant's suppression activity. Overall, the researchers found that the depressed group showed decreases in all tasks. However, researchers stated that the depressed group performed better under difficult suppression conditions than under easy task instructions (Christopher et al., 2005). The researchers concluded that there was evidence of differences between depressed and non-depressed participants on working memory tasks. Furthermore, performance in the depressed group showed greater impairment without suppression tasks. Finally, the results showed that performance differed between the depressed group and the two comparison groups as the tasks increased. A significant amount of research has shown that depression has a significant impact on working memory, such as studies by Hubbard et al., 2015; Christopher et al., 2005. Furthermore, Li et al., 2015 in a related study focusing on gender differences and emotional working memory. Other studies have focused on working memory impairment for emotional stimuli (Zhang et al., 2018). However, only one study has focused on the effects of working memory in children (Greenwald et al., 2018). As a result, more studies are needed on how depression affects children and their working memory. As children grow and develop, they experience difficult situations such as bullying or parental divorce. This research will seek to determine how working memory is affected by depression in children who are victims of bullying. Working memory is hypothesized to be negatively affected more in these children than in those diagnosed with clinical depression. For this particular research, 40 children would be recruited from middle schools in Prince George's County Maryland and Baltimore County. Bullying incidents in middle schools are higher than in other classes, perhaps because children form groups, "find themselves" and simply grow up. Participating middle schools would be Pine Grove in Baltimore and Walker Mill in Capitol Heights. Additionally, 25 clinically depressed children who were bullied and receiving treatment at an outpatient facility would be recruited with their parents' permission. Researchers would meet with both parents and students..