Abstract
Overgeneral memory, where individuals exhibit difficulties in retrieving specific episodes from autobiographical memory, has been consistently linked with emotional disorders. However, the majority of this literature has relied upon a single methodology, in which participants respond to emotional cue words with explicit instructions to retrieve/simulate specific events. Through the use of sentence completion tasks the current studies explored whether overgenerality represents a habitual pattern of thinking that extends to how individuals naturally consider their personal past and future life story. In both studies, when compared with controls, dysphoric individuals evidenced overgeneral thinking style with respect to their personal past. However, overgeneral future thinking was only evident when the sentence stems included emotional words. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the overgenerality phenomenon using a variety of cueing techniques and results are discussed with reference to the previous literature exploring overgenerality and cognitive models of depression.
Highlights
One key bias evidenced by depressed individuals relates to the accessibility of information from within autobiographical memory
Termed overgeneral memory (OGM), this bias is characterised by difficulties retrieving memories for specific episodes
A truncated search may result from reduced executive capacity (X) or as an adaptive coping mechanism, termed functional avoidance (FA), whereby the negative affect associated with specific events is minimised by retrieval of more general memories
Summary
One key bias evidenced by depressed individuals relates to the accessibility of information from within autobiographical memory. One concern is that the vast majority of our knowledge regarding overgeneral thinking in depression has been derived from a single methodological paradigm; this approach, using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) and its future oriented equivalent - the Future Event Task (FET), focuses on voluntary recall/simulation directed by emotional cues. Work in this domain drew comparisons between events produced in response to positive vs negative cues. Research using AMT, and to a lesser extent the FET, has yielded a wealth of information regarding the relationship between overgenerality and emotional distress, it is not without its limitations; Williams et al (2007) called for a diversification in the methodologies used to investigate the overgenerality phenomenon
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