Affect Memory in Depression: Evidence of Better Delayed Recall of Positive than Negative Affect Words

Abstract

It is widely accepted that depressives focus on negative memories, and forget or repress positive memories (showing a mood-congruent affective tendency). Normals have an opposite positive bias in memory (‘Pollyanna tendency’). Research evidence for depressives’ negative bias in memory comes mainly from studies of retrieval of personal experiences during depression, or from studies of such retrieval during induced mood. In the present study, the hypothesis that depressives encode and remember negative emotion materials better than other materials was tested. Contrary to the hypothesis, the results showed that severely depressed patients remembered more positive affect than negative affect words, after a 2-day delay. Depressives’ overall memory performance and rate of forgetting were poor, similar to schizophrenics’, and worse than normals’. The results suggest that, while memory performance during a depressive episode is poor, the memory consolidation process for affective information is normal. Unlike in schizophrenia, it does not select negative emotion materials. This conclusion is not incongruent with the finding that depressives show mood-congruent retrieval for previously learnt personal (experiential) information. The consolidation of non-personal (nonexperiential) positive affect materials during depression may provide a clue as to the mechanism of recovery in depression, and the lack of such recovery in schizophrenia.

Investigation of mood-congruent false and true memory recognition in depression

“…Consistent with prior research, it was hypothesized that depressed patients would recognize more moodcongruent words (i.e., depression-relevant words) than controls would, although newer studies call for some caution regarding the replicability of this bias [Banos et al, 2001;Bazin et al, 1996;Calev, 1996]. As outlined above, no clear predictions can be made concerning the extent of false recognition.…”

La opinión negativa del sí-mismo en los trastornos depresivos

“…La evidencia de un autoesquema marcadamente positivo en los sujetos no deprimidos se constata en numerosos estudios (Abramson y Alloy, 1981;Greenberg et al, 1988). Asimismo, la evidencia de sesgos positivos en el procesamiento de información para los sujetos no deprimidos, también se ha mostrado consistente en muchas investigaciones (Derry y Kuiper, 1981;Greenberg et al, 1988;Hedlund y Rude, 1995;Calev, 1996). Calev (1996) se refiere a este efecto como la «tendencia pollyana».…”

“…Asimismo, la evidencia de sesgos positivos en el procesamiento de información para los sujetos no deprimidos, también se ha mostrado consistente en muchas investigaciones (Derry y Kuiper, 1981;Greenberg et al, 1988;Hedlund y Rude, 1995;Calev, 1996). Calev (1996) se refiere a este efecto como la «tendencia pollyana». En definitiva, para poder profundizar en estas explicaciones, se hace imprescindible continuar la investigación con nuevos estudios controlados.…”

“…El meta-análisis realizado por Matt, Vázquez y Campbell (1992), avaló estos resultados para los estudios con poblaciones clínicas. Sin embargo, estudios posteriores no han logrado reproducir ese mismo efecto, utilizando diseños experimentales similares, e igualmente muesfras clínicas (Hedlund y Rude, 1995, Calev, 1996, Giménez, 2000. A la vista de estos resultados, la evidencia de un sesgo de memoria en el procesamiento de información autorreferente en personas deprimidas, considerando especialmente el recuerdo incidental, no se ha mostrado consistente.…”

Effects of depressive disorder on false memory for emotional information

“…In the study of the relationship between emotion and memory, past research [1][2][3][4] has shown that depressed people have a memory bias for emotional information. The main theoretical framework regarding such a bias is mood-congruent memory (MCM) [5][6][7] , which is defined as the tendency to recall information that is conceptually congruent with one's mood.…”