Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 7-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Memory for emotional stories in high and low depressed children

Memory for emotional stories in high and low depressed children Cognitive theories of depression emphasise a vicious circle linking depressed mood and biased recall towards negative information. In line with this, depressed adults show selectively enhanced recall for negative information. This recall bias is held to be mediated by increased accessibility of negative self‐referent schemas formed as a result of adverse early experiences. Given this, surprisingly few studies have examined depression‐related recall biases from a developmental perspective. Clinically depressed children have been found to show enhanced recall of negative adjectives, particularly when self‐referent, but to date there is no evidence for similar recall biases in non‐clinically depressed groups. The current study addressed this by investigating high and low non‐clinically depressed children's (aged 5–11 years) recall of emotional stories. High depressed children showed enhanced recall of negative stories, relative to positive stories, compared to the low depressed group. This did not vary with age group. We conclude that, when child‐oriented materials are used, depression‐related biases in recall towards negative information are observable even in a non‐clinical sample of children from 5 years of age. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Memory Taylor & Francis

Memory for emotional stories in high and low depressed children

Bishop, Sonia; Dalgleish, Tim; Yule, William
Memory , Volume 12 (2): 17 – Mar 1, 2004
Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/memory-for-emotional-stories-in-high-and-low-depressed-children-l6o9vd1gwm

References (30)

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN
1464-0686
eISSN
0965-8211
DOI
10.1080/09658210244000667
pmid
15250186
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Cognitive theories of depression emphasise a vicious circle linking depressed mood and biased recall towards negative information. In line with this, depressed adults show selectively enhanced recall for negative information. This recall bias is held to be mediated by increased accessibility of negative self‐referent schemas formed as a result of adverse early experiences. Given this, surprisingly few studies have examined depression‐related recall biases from a developmental perspective. Clinically depressed children have been found to show enhanced recall of negative adjectives, particularly when self‐referent, but to date there is no evidence for similar recall biases in non‐clinically depressed groups. The current study addressed this by investigating high and low non‐clinically depressed children's (aged 5–11 years) recall of emotional stories. High depressed children showed enhanced recall of negative stories, relative to positive stories, compared to the low depressed group. This did not vary with age group. We conclude that, when child‐oriented materials are used, depression‐related biases in recall towards negative information are observable even in a non‐clinical sample of children from 5 years of age.

Journal

Memory – Taylor & Francis

Published: Mar 1, 2004

There are no references for this article.