Self-reference and the encoding of personal information in depression

Abstract

This paper questions for the first time whether a negative self-schema is a regular symptom of depression. An alternative position derives from clinical evidence suggesting that many depressed persons describe themselves inconsistently. A distinction between schema- and non-schema-based responding is proposed and tested with the spread of processing model: Depressed and nondepressed subjects are compared for incidental recall of personal adjectives under a self-reference encoding task, a semantic task, and two other lower level encoding tasks. As expected, the groups differed significantly only on self-reference recall; depressives showed significantly weaker recall on this task. Duration of depression significantly predicted the strength of self-reference recall. The results are interpreted in a developmental framework, which suggests that a self-schema in depression develops, as does any schema, over time and repeated use.