A structural analysis of the self-schema construct in major depression

Abstract

Cognitive organization in depression was investigated using a modification of the Stroop Colour-Naming task, which attempted to prime or activate subjects' self-schemata prior to testing. Unipolar Depressed patients (n =14), Anxiety Disorder patients (n =9), and normal controls (n =14) were asked to color-name personal adjectives that had been previously rated as either extremely self-descriptive or neutral. Each experimental trial consisted of the presentation of a prime word followed by a target word printed in color, and the subject's task was to name the color of the target and then recall the prime. Results indicated a significant effect of prime-target relatedness, in that longer color-naming latencies were obtained when the prime and the target were both self-descriptive adjectives than when only the target was self-descriptive and the prime was not. This suggests that information about the self is represented with a higher degree of interconnection than information that is not self-descriptive, and in this sense supports the notion of a cognitive schema about the self. For self-descriptive adjectives alone this effect was significant for the depressed group. Depressed patients were more likely to endorse negative adjectives as self-referent than were nondepressed subjects, suggesting that the content of depressives' self-schemata may be relatively more negative. As a further control, yoked-normal subjects were tested using the same set of stimuli employed for depressed subjects. No relatedness effect emerged, offering evidence that the differences in color-naming latencies reported above may be attributed to the personal relatedness of the words rather than to any semantic properties they possessed.