Affect and vigilance performance in depressive illness

The relationships between the affective states of depression and anxiety on the one hand, and vigilance performance on the other, were examined for 10 neurotic depressive patients, 10 psychotic depressive patients and 10 normal controls. Affect did not consistently and systematically influence vigilance performance for individual subject groups.Combination of all 3 groups did however produce some significant relationships in the hypothesized directions. A significant negative relationship between severity of depressive affect and signal detection performance and a significant curvilinear (inverted U) relationship between anxiety and signal detection performance allowed confirmation of the hypotheses.The results were discussed in terms of a cognitive deficit among patients with depressive illness.