Narrative and emotion integration in psychotherapy: investigating the relationship between autobiographical memory specificity and expressed emotional arousal in brief emotion-focused and client-centred treatments of depression.

Clinically depressed individuals have consistently been shown to demonstrate a bias for overgeneral autobiographical memory (ABM) disclosure, a strategy used to protect against the access of intense, primary emotions that may accompany specific memories. The present study examined how ABM specificity in client narratives was related to expressed emotional arousal in brief emotion-focused and client-centred psychotherapy for depression. Emotion episodes identified in two early-, two middle-, and two late-therapy transcripts drawn from 34 clients from the York I Depression Study were rated for degree of ABM specificity and expressed emotional arousal. A hierarchical linear modelling analysis demonstrated that greater ABM specificity was associated with higher expressed emotional arousal for clients who were no longer depressed at therapy termination.

An empirical analysis of autobiographical memory specificity subtypes in brief emotion-focused and client-centered treatments of depression.

Overgeneral autobiographical memory (ABM) disclosure has been established as a key cognitive marker of clinical depression in experimental research studies. To determine the ecological validity of these findings for psychotherapy treatments of depression, the present study investigated the relationship between change in level of depression and ABM specificity in the context of early, middle, and late therapy session transcripts selected from 34 clients undergoing emotion-focused therapy and client-centered therapy in the York I Depression Study. A hierarchical linear modeling analysis demonstrated that clients disclosed significantly more specific ABMs over the course of therapy. There were no differences in ABM specificity between treatment groups. There was also no evidence that increased specificity differentiated between recovered and unchanged clients at treatment termination.