The effect of cloninger temperament and character features on hot and cold cognitions in remitted depression

Objectives: Since Beck, depression is recognized as a cognitive disorder. Studies related to cognitive functions in recent years examine depression in terms of emotion and motivation laden hot cognition and cold cognition, independently of emotion and motivation. Temperament, character traits and depression intersect at many common points, affecting similar cold and hot cognitions. In patients with remitted depression, the results are contradictory. In our study, it was aimed to show whether temperament and character traits in remitted depression affect cold and hot cognitions and whether they can provide an explanation for contradictory results. Method: The research was carried out with 78 volunteers, 47 patients, 31 of whom were control groups, applied to Celal Bayar University Hospital Psychiatry outpatient clinic. Volunteers, complied with the inclusion criteria after the DSM-5 Structured Clinical Interview-Clinical Version (SCID-5/CV), WAIS-R Vocabulary Subtest, Hamilton Depression Scale and Hamilton Anxiety Scale, were included in the study. Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), Stroop test, Wisconsin Card Sorting test, Trail Making test, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning test, Auditory Consonant Trigram test, Face Emotion Recognition test, Face Emotion Discrimination test, Hinting task, Iowa gambling test have been applied. Statistical analyzes were performed using SPSS Statistics 21.0 programme and T test, Mann Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis test, Pearson Correlation test were conducted. p<0.05 was accepted as the criterion of significance. Results: It was found that harm avoidance was high and self-directedness was low in patients with remitted depression. In this period, it was shown that the search for novelty seeking was found to be high, and that the reward dependence and persistence factors were high together. Another finding was that temperament affects more hot cognitions, character more cold cognitions and also temperament and character modulates the effects of each other on the cognition. High reward dependence and harm avoidance were positively correlated with affective decision making from hot cognitive tests and reaction time from cold cognitive tests. The correlation between high novelty seeking and affective decision making was negative. Low self-directedness negatively affected all cold cognitive facets such as response time, working memory and memory. Conclusion: In conclusion, in our study, it was shown that temperament and character features affect cold and hot cognitions in remittted depression. It was found that temperament and character traits continued to affect cold and hot cognitive functions in the direction of their own characteristics in the remission period, both of which can be evaluated as trait markers. Findings need to be repeated in a larger sample. Keywords: Cloninger Temperament and Character, Remitted Depression, Cold and Hot Cognition