| Description |
It has been reported that persons suffering from depression tend to have difficulty retrieving autobiographical memories of events that occurred on a single day in their lives (e.g., "Last Tuesday night in the Student Union"), and tend instead to retrieve memories that encompass a category of events over extended time periods (e.g., "I used to go to the Student Union a lot."). However, the instrument with which this phenomenon is generally measured - the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) - appears to confound the effects of at least two separate underlying processes: (1) the inability or unwillingness of depressed persons to remember and comply with the AMT's instruction to retrieve only single-day memories (instruction neglect), and (2) the tendency of depressed persons to have a preponderance of (or easier access to) autobiographical memories that conflate extended time periods and/or categories of events, and to have fewer (or more difficult access to) autobiographical memories of single-day events (autobiographical overgenerality). There are reasons to suppose that both of these processes may be associated with depression and that they both contribute to, and are confounded in, scores on the AMT. This dissertation project employed two different versions of the AMT in an attempt to dissociate these two processes. However, the scores on neither of these tests correlated with measures of depression, depressive rumination, or executive dysfunction. Given the power of this study, these null results are partially interpretable, and a plausible explanation there for is that scores on the standard version of the AMT are driven largely by instruction neglect, but the design of this study inadvertently prevented the detection of that process. |
