ABSTRACT
Several studies show that depressed people tend to overgeneralize when asked to recall autobiographical memories (AM); in particular, they respond with categoric descriptions. The authors sought to find out whether this tendency also occurs after remission from depression. Two groups of women who were not depressed at the time of the study were compared; only 1 group had a history of major depression. With an AM test, women in remission from major depression retrieved significantly more categoric descriptions when responding to negative cue words than women without a major depression in their biography. These findings support the assumption that AM is a correlate and a consequence of depression.
Subject(s)
Autobiographies as Topic , Depressive Disorder, Major/psychology , Memory , Adult , Case-Control Studies , Female , Humans , Middle AgedABSTRACT
This study tries to reveal differences in the valency and concreteness ratings for nouns, verbs, and adverbs between depressive (N = 20) and nondepressive (N = 20) persons. For the valency ratings the results show significant differences between the two groups and between the syntactical categories as well as an interaction between the factors group and syntactical categories. For concreteness ratings we found a significant main effect for the group factor, a significant interaction between group and syntactical categories, and also a significant three way interaction between group, syntactical categories, and word valency. From these results it follows that, before conducting experiments in clinical psychology, one must establish the participants' representation of words that are used as stimuli. Otherwise, results could easily be misinterpreted as specific experimental results.
