Poster Session 11 Program Schedule
02/17/2024
10:45 am - 12:00 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 11: Cultural Neuropsychology | Education/Training | Professional Practice Issues
Final Abstract #28
Racial Differences in the Relationships of Depression with Emotion Processing and Inhibitory Control in Korean-Born Immigrant Women and American-Born White Women
Rebecca Easter, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, United States
Somi Lee, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Matthew Thompson, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Aileen Duong, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Seonggyun Han, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Scott Langenecker, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Category: Mood and Anxiety Disorders
Keyword 1: depression
Keyword 2: social cognition
Keyword 3: executive functions
Objective:
Research shows that sociocultural factors, such as race and immigrant status, can be risk factors for depression. Korean immigrants represent a particularly high-risk group, with prior findings that they are significantly more likely to experience depression but significantly less likely to pursue mental health services. Additionally, prior research suggests that emotion processing and inhibitory control are impacted during depressive episodes. This study’s aim was to elucidate how depression may differently impact Korean immigrant women by investigating potential racial differences in the relationships between cognition and depression in Korean and White women. Moreover, we hoped to better understand which cognitive domains may be more or less impacted by cultural factors, to help inform the cultural sensitivity and validity of future research.
Participants and Methods:
199 American-born White women and 154 Korean-born Asian immigrant women completed a virtual self-report and neuropsychological battery. The sample was limited to women to reduce gender-related variance. Regressions were conducted to examine interactions between race and cognition on depression, specifically emotion processing efficiency (accuracy and reaction time) and inhibitory control.
Results:
A significant interaction between the emotion processing of Asian faces and participant race on the prediction of depressive symptoms was found, such that the efficient processing of Asian faces was a better predictor for depression in White women than Korean women. However, this racial difference was not detected for emotion processing of White faces. Additionally, we found a main effect of inhibition on depression but did not find an effect of race.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that White women with higher depression demonstrated slower and less accurate emotion processing of Asian faces than their less depressed counterparts. Conversely, though there was a relationship between depression and emotion processing in the Korean women, the effect was significantly more muted, such that Korean women demonstrated more similar levels of emotion processing regardless of their level of depressive symptoms. This finding supports the concept of in-group advantage (individuals have better emotion processing for in-group members than out-group ones) in the context of depression; depression appeared to be uniquely related to the White sample’s ability to process emotions on Asian faces but not the Korean sample. In contrast, White and Korean women showed a similar pattern in the relationship between depression and emotion processing of White faces. Finally, we did not find a racial difference in the relationship between depression and inhibitory control.
Overall, our findings suggest that emotion processing has a significant sociocultural influence whereas inhibitory control may be a more culturally independent cognitive domain. The seeming cultural independence of inhibitory control may provide a unique opportunity for measures of inhibition to circumvent the influence of culture and race and allow for the examination of depression in a more culturally valid manner than measures that are more culturally biased (e.g. self-reports, emotion processing). Future research that delves deeper into the relationships between culture, cognition, and depression is warranted.
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