Autobiographical memory specificity in response to verbal and pictorial cues in clinical depression

Nathan Ridout, Barbara Dritschel, Keith Matthews, Ronan O'Carroll

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background
Depressed individuals have been consistently shown to exhibit problems in accessing specific memories of events from their past and instead tend to retrieve categorical summaries of events. The majority of studies examining autobiographical memory changes associated with psychopathology have tended to use word cues, but only one study to date has used images (with PTSD patients).

Objective
to determine if using images to cue autobiographical memories would reduce the memory specificity deficit exhibited by patients with depression in comparison to healthy controls.

Methods
Twenty-five clinically depressed patients and twenty-five healthy controls were assessed on two versions of the autobiographical memory test; cued with emotional words and images.

Results
Depressed patients retrieved significantly fewer specific memories, and a greater number of categorical, than did the controls. Controls retrieved a greater proportion of specific memories to images compared to words, whereas depressed patients retrieved a similar proportion of specific memories to both images and words.

Limitations
no information about the presence and severity of past trauma was collected.

Conclusions
results suggest that the overgeneral memory style in depression generalises from verbal to pictorial cues. This is important because retrieval to images may provide a more ecologically valid test of everyday memory experiences than word-cued retrieval.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)109-115
JournalJournal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Volume51
Early online date13 Jan 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2016

Keywords

  • Overgeneral memory
  • Specificity
  • Depression
  • Autobiographical Memory Test
  • Imagery

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