1. Overgeneral autobiographical memory and executive functioning in adolescent depression
Background Depression
Up to 1 in 4 young people will experience an episode of depression by the time they turn 18.
Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory
Autobiographical memory is our memory for personal experiences that have happened in the past.
Overgeneral memory (OGM) is when people find it difficult to remember specific details about their past. When asked for past experiences, adults and adolescents with depression symptoms find it hard to give specific details.
In some cases, this difficultly has predicted whether people develop depression symptoms later on. Therefore we want to know more about this memory problem and why it might happen.
What might cause OGM?
Impaired thinking processes, called “executive functions” might mean that people find it difficult to remember specific details about events in their past.
These thinking processes are also important for activities such as learning, planning and organizing.
There has been very little research done in adolescents.
The Current Study
We want to know if adolescents with depression symptoms found it harder to remember specific details from their past, and how they performed on different thinking tasks.
Method
We compared adolescents (from a school) who had a high number of depression symptoms, to adolescents who had none or very few symptoms.
All participants completed some fun interactive tasks.
Measures:
The Autobiographical memory test (Williams and Broadbent 1986)
This measures overgeneral memory
Participants are given a word and asked to remember a specific memory that the word reminds them of.
Measures for Executive Function
1) The Hayling Sentence Completion
This measures how well people can ignore irrelevant information.
Participants are read a sentence which has the last word missing. They have to finish the sentence as quickly as possible with a completely unconnected word
2) Keep Track Task
This measures how well people work with information in their mind.
Participants are given target categories e.g. colours, animals and then shows a list of words that include examples from these categories e.g. blue, cat. They are asked to recall the last example.
What have we found ?
Adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression gave more overgeneral memories. Adolescents with elevated symptoms made more mistakes on the keep track task but not on the sentence completion task. This suggests that some thinking processes are impaired in young people with depression symptoms and this could be why they struggle to recall specific details.
Her new shoes were the wrong…Happiness
A specific memory…
“I felt excited when I was on the way
to Thorpe Park last weekend”
An over general memory…
“I feel excited at the weekends”
Dog
Colours Animals Furniture
What does this mean?
The study helps us to understand which thinking processes might be impaired in
adolescents with depression symptoms
The results give us ideas about how we might prevent depression
symptoms developing in teenagers e.g. by improving certain thinking processes
Contact information
Department of Psychology and Clinical Language Science, University of Reading, Whiteknights, RG6 6AH
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