A Study of Autobiographical Memories in Depressed and Nondepressed Elderly Individuals

Abstract

An autobiographical memory task was used to study memory processes and depression in elderly individuals. Twenty-seven nondepressed and twenty-seven depressed elderly participants recalled thirty memories. Each memory was self-rated for happiness versus sadness and the degree of importance of the event at the time the event occurred (i.e., "then") and looking back on the event ("now"). Nondepressed participants perceived greater positive change in affective tone between "then" and "now" ratings. Depressed participants recalled more memories rated as sad "now" than nondepressed, and perceived negative and positive memories to become more neutral than nondepressed participants. These results are consistent with a mood congruence hypothesis, in that participants recalled more memories affectively consistent with current mood, and a self-enhancement view of reminiscing, such that recalling memories evaluated as happier was associated with less depression.

Mood congruence in childhood and recent autobiographical memory

“…Autobiographical memory was more systematically sampled by randomly assigning these cues to childhood or recent periods in the participants' lives (Chew, 1979; see also Kihlstrom et al, 1988). In order to track changes in the affective valences of the memories over time (and thus obtain information about how memory retrieval might be affected by affect regulation), participants rated how they perceived the events they recalled now and also from the perspective of when the events actually occurred (Holmes, 1970;Yang & Rehm, 1993). As an additional measure of mood-congruency, we recorded response latencies in the cued-recall task (Clark & Teasdale, 1982;Lloyd & Lishman, 1975;MacLeod, Andersen, & Davies, 1994;Teasdale & Fogarty, 1979;Teasdale & Taylor, 1981).…”

Overgeneral autobiographical memory effect in older depressed adults

“…This means that as people grow older they experience fewer negative emotions. This positivity bias in memory appears to be a significant factor that contributes to the increase in positive emotion observed in older people (Pasupathi & Carstensen, 2003;Yang & Rehm, 1993).…”

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

“…Martin and Smyer (1990) asked participants to report about life events that had occurred at different times in their life span and found that the ratio of positive and negative events was 1.6, which means that for each 10 negative events there were 16 positive events. In a study where depressed and nondepressed participants were asked to retrieve 30 memories, all participants recalled more positive than negative memories (Yang & Rehm, 1993). Using a diary self-report memory method, Thompson (1998) found a small effect of pleasantness such that positive events were remembered slightly better than negative events.…”