The authors review research showing that when recalling autobiographical events, many emotionally disturbed patients summarize categories of events rather than retrieving a single episode. The mechanisms underlying such overgeneral memory are examined, with a focus on M. A. Conway and C. W. Pleydell-Pearce's (2000) hierarchical search model of personal event retrieval. An elaboration of this model is proposed to account for overgeneral memory, focusing on how memory search can be affected by (a) capture and rumination processes, when mnemonic information used in retrieval activates ruminative thinking; (b) functional avoidance, when episodic material threatens to cause affective disturbance; and (c) impairment in executive capacity and control that limits an individual's ability to remain focused on retrieval in the face of distraction.

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Previous research on depressed and suicidal patients and those with posttraumatic stress disorder has shown that patients' memory for the past is overgeneral (i.e., patients retrieve generic summaries of past events rather than specific events). This study investigated whether autobiographical memory could be affected by psychological treatment. Recovered depressed patients were randomly allocated to receive either treatment as usual or treatment designed to reduce risk of relapse. Whereas control patients showed no change in specificity of memories recalled in response to cue words, the treatment group showed a significantly reduced number of generic memories. Although such a memory deficit may arise from long-standing tendencies to encode and retrieve events generically, such a style is open to modification.

SYNOPSIS Recent research has shown that suicidal patients are not only biased in the speed with which they can remember positive and negative events from their past, but that they also find it more difficult to be specific in their memories. That is, they tend to recall sequences of events, or time periods, rather than single episodes. This tendency has been found to be more evident with positive than with negative events. This paper examines whether the same phenomenon can be observed in patients with a diagnosis of primary Major Depressive Disorder. Twenty depressed patients and twenty matched controls were presented with positive and negative cue words and asked to retrieve specific personal memories. Results showed that depressives (unlike controls) took longer to respond to positive than to negative cues. In addition, the depressed patients were less specific in their memories, especially in response to positive cues. These results are explained within a 'descriptions' theory of autobiographical memory, and the remedial implications are discussed.