Depressive deficits and bias: a direct comparison of two implicit measures of memory

✍ Scribed by Glenys Caseley-Rondi; Michael Gemar; Zindel Segal

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 189 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1063-3995
• DOI: 10.1002/cpp.270

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Repeated findings of depressive deficits and mood‐congruent biases on explicit measures of memory have lent much support to cognitive models of depression. However, studies to date have been inconclusive with respect to such deficits or biases on implicit measures. Given current assertions that implicit use of memory is far more pervasive than explicit use, clarification of these issues has important implications for our understanding of cognitive factors in clinical depression and its treatment. We consider both these issues, and, in particular, we follow up the suggestion by Roediger and McDermott (1992) that conceptually driven implicit measures of memory are more appropriate to detect depressive bias than those that are typically used, which are perceptually driven. In this study we directly compare the memory performance of 24 clinically depressed patients with 24 nondepressed controls on a perceptually driven implicit task (fragment completion) and a comparable task that is more conceptually driven (cued fragment completion). Although depressive deficits were obtained on both these measures, no bias was revealed. We consider alternative research designs for clarification of these findings. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.