4: Autobiographical Memory and Depression Flashcards
Define autobiographical memory.
Memory for personally experienced events.
What is a specific autobiographical memory?
Memory for an event that occurred at a particular time and place with lots of context and detail.
What is a categoric autobiographical memory?
Memory for a collection of events.
What is an extended autobiographical memory?
Memory for an event that lasts more than one day, helps us organise our past using significant time periods and has specific and categories memories embedded.
Why is memory important in understanding why people attempt suicide?
We have to wonder how people think about their past and how this effects what they think about their future.
What 3 factors are believed to be relevant to memory in people just prior to suicide?
Not being amenable to persuasion, not being to use coping strategies and only remembering failures and disappointments.
Briefly describe Williams and Broadbent’s methodology.
Recent suicide attempters, hospitalised control and healthy controls completed a mood questionnaire, hopeless scale, AM task (using pleasant and unpleasant cue words) and semantic memory tasks.
What were the results of Williams and Broadbent’s study?
OD group has significantly lower mood, higher hopelessness, slower retrieval of positive memories and more overgeneral memories (to positive cues in particular). No difference in latency for negative memories.
In what populations is greater overgeneral recall found?
Depression, suicide attempted, PTSD and eating disorders.
What are the 2 components of rumination?
Self focus and analytical/ evaluative cognitive style.
In their study using mood measures and cued categorical recall, what were the four types of attention manipulation used by Roberts et al.?
High self focus, high analysis (rumination + meaning), high SF, low A (rumination + sensations), low SF, high A (abstract + meaning) and low SF, low A (external).
What were the results of Roberts et al’s study?
Self focus altered mood, lower analysis lead to free categories memories, high analysis led to (non sig) more categories memories and distraction led to fewer categories memories.
What can modify overgeneral memory?
Thinking style: reducing analysis and rumination.
Why might people who have recovered from depression still have overgeneral memories?
Their mood may have improved but analytical style is unchanged.
What were the results of Raes et al’s study?
Trait rumination related to reduced autobiographical memory specificity after (but not before) a self-discrepancy induction with formerly depressed participants.
