Cognitive Therapy and Research, VoL 15, No. 4, 1991, pp. 283-302 Depression and the Processing of Emotional Stimuli: A Study of Semantic Priming 1 Gerald Matthews 2 and Angela Southall Aston University. This study used a semantic priming paradigm to test spreading activation network models of the effects of depression on attention and memory. Semantic priming and recognition memory for positive, neutral, and negative words were tested in depressed and matched control subjects. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between primes and target strings was manipulated to distinguish between automatic and controlled routes for the spread of activation. In unprimed lexical decision, depressives were slower to respond to neutral than to emotional words at the short SOA, suggesting tonic activation of emotional concepts in these subjects. However, depressives also showed enhanced automatic priming to neutral words, and reduced priming to emotional words, suggesting that depressives may be impaired in the automatic association of emotional concepts. On recognition memory, depressives committed most false positive responses to negative words, whereas controls committed most false positives to positive words, a finding interpreted in telwls of elaboration strategies. Implications of the data for current network models of depression are discussed. KEY WORDS: depression; associative networks; semantic priming; recognition memory. There is extensive evidence that depression is associated with affect- related bias in cognition. Relative to nondepressed controls, depressed patients tend to retrieve more negative memories, to show greater sen- sitivity to negative stimuli, and to evaluate the self and other people more 1We are grateful to Dr. S. M. Khan, Dr. V. A. Church and Ms. J. Smolenski, of District Psychological Services, Stafford, England, for their assistance with this research. 2Address all correspondence to Gerald Matthews, Department of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland. 283 0147-5916/91/080o-0283506.50 © 1991PlenumPublishing Corporation