Implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information are not related to the level of depressive symptomatology

Past research has found that depression is associated with a multitude of deficits in processing social stimuli. These deficits might impair the implicit (unconscious) learning of socio-emotional regularities, an essential process for adaptive social functioning. In contrast, previous research on adaptive functions of depression suggests that dysphoric states can be associated, in some circumstances, with increased accuracy in detecting regularities. However, a direct assessment of implicit learning of socio-emotional regularities in depression has not yet been conducted. In the present studies, we adapted the Artificial Grammar Learning task to induce implicit and explicit learning of regularities that govern social emotional stimuli (facial emotional expressions in Experiment 1) and social stimuli without explicit emotional content (body movements in Experiment 2). We assessed participants’ learning and awareness of these regularities, as well as their levels of depression. In both experiments, Bayesian analyses showed that the depressive symptomatology was neither associated with a learning deficit, nor with a learning advantage. This was the case for participants’ overall performance, as well as for their implicit and their explicit learning performance. Our results contradict most previous findings and show that, even though depressive symptoms are associated with a variety of socio-cognitive deficits, they do not hinder the ability to implicitly or explicitly learn regularities within social contexts. Our results also show some constraints on the types of abilities that can be enhanced by depressive states.