The effects of current mood and prior depressive history on self-schematic processing in children

Previous research has indicated that children display facilitated recall of personal adjectives judged to be self-descriptive; and most critically, positive and negative adjectives are differentially recalled by relatively depressed and nondepressed children. Such evidence of apparent self-schemas was explored in additional samples of children with current or past histories of diagnosable depression. As predicted, clinically depressed children showed even stronger recall of negative self-descriptive adjectives than in previous research. However, extent of previous experience with depression did not predict degree of negativity of current self-schema beyond that predicted by current mood. The results are discussed in terms of recent findings with depressed adults and are seen as compatible with a developmental model of self-schemas in which prior experience may affect accessibility of negative cognitions once the self-schema has been activated.