Remembering with and without awareness in a depressed mood: Evidence of deficits in initiative.

Abstract

We propose that depressive deficits in remembering are revealed in tasks that allow the spontaneous use of strategies; tasks that bypass or direct the use of strategies should not produce depressive deficits. College students received depressive-or neutral-mood inductions after answering questions worded to reflect homophones' less common meaning. After the inductions, subjects spelled old and new homophones and showed no effect of the depressive inductions on unaware memory for the old homophones. Subsequent tests of recognition did, however, reveal differences according to the induced mood or the presence of naturally occurring depression (in Experiment 3). The differences, evidence of nondepressed subjects' use of strategies, tended to disappear when all subjects were provided with strategies for spelling or recognition. The results indicate that depressives experience deficits in cognitive initiative. We review the literature on depressive memory from this perspective.

The cognitive-initiative account of depression-related impairments in memory

“…In a much earlier series of recognition experiments that relied on source monitoring in a different way, Tammy Hardin and I were more successful in closing the dysphoria gap (Hertel & Hardin, 1990). We obtained stochastic independence between performance on an indirect test of homophone spelling and performance on a subsequent recognition test, but only when participants were dysphoric.…”

“…Indirect tests are carefully designed to insure that participants do not deliberately think back to a prior experimental phase as they are spelling homophones, completing word fragments or word stems, or freely associating to cues. Indeed, no differences have been found on tests of homophone spelling (Hertel & Hardin, 1990), word completion (Danion et al, 1991;Denny & Hunt, 1992;Watkins, Mathews, Williamson, & Fuller, 1992), or free association (Watkins, Vache, Verney, Muller, & Mathews, 1996). Yet the extent to which a particular word comes to mind to provide a spelling, complete a stem, or relate to a cue should also reflect the extent to which that particular word was attended initially.…”

“…For example, Hertel and Hardin (1990) inferred that nondysphoric participants' stochastic dependence of homophone recognition on prior spelling reflected the use of an attentional strategy at the time of the test; we therefore guided the dysphoric participants' use of that strategy, trial-by-trial, and remediated the recognition deficit. Hertel and Rude (1991a,b) surmised that the constraints on attention during initial exposure to target materials were lax; we therefore tightened the demands of the orienting task by requiring sustained attention to the targets and thereby remediated the deficit in subsequent recall.…”

“…Second, a deficit has been found on the simple task of perceptual identification (Hertel, 1994), and the condition of initial exposure that produced the deficit was the less resource-demanding task: the task of rating curvature, not the task of rating emotionality. Third is evidence that external control can sometimes compensate for deficiencies in less-structured situations, even when the task is resource-intensive (Hertel & Hardin, 1990;Hertel & Rude, 1991a,b). Thus, the contribution of the initiative framework has been to emphasize the importance of attentional control during unstructured conditions.…”

“…When it is used in the context of research on memory and cognition, it refers to the research participants' , use of cognitive procedures that are not specified fully by the constraints j of the experimental task (e.g., Hertel & Hardin, 1990). When it is used in , an everyday context, however, it suggests an active motivational state or : a certain readiness to perform, as in, "She showed excellent initiative in organizing the meeting."…”