The relationships of positive and negative symptoms with neuropsychological functioning and their ability to predict verbal memory in psychotic major depression

Neuropsychological functioning, in relation to positive and negative symptoms in psychotic major depression (PMD), has not been as thoroughly studied as it has been in schizophrenia. Thus, the current study investigated the associations between positive and negative symptoms with cognitive functioning, with an emphasis on verbal memory in PMD. Attention, working memory, and the executive functioning domains were analyzed among 49 PMD participants. Positive symptoms did not correlate significantly with any measures of verbal memory but did correlate with one measure of attention, working memory, and executive functioning. Negative symptoms correlated significantly with two California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) measures of verbal memory and three measures of executive function. Hierarchical regressions were conducted to determine if negative symptoms could predict verbal memory performance after controlling for depression. Of the two verbal memory measures, negative symptoms significantly explained additional variance for CVLT Recognition, but not for CVLT Trials 1-5 total score. Our results provide some evidence that, consistent with the schizophrenia literature, negative symptoms contributed more to verbal memory deficits in PMD than positive symptoms, regardless of depression severity.