The influence of depression on the processing of personal attributes

Depressed, schizophrenic and normal subjects were tested for incidental recall and recognition of lists of positive and negative personal attributes. It was hypothesised that depressives would show a deficit in recall and recognition of words of which they had been asked a self-referential encoding question, but would show equivalent performance to controls on words of which they had been asked an other-referential, semantic or structural encoding question. The experiment was designed to enable a decision to be made between two possible explanations of the expected deficit: Davis's (1979) suggestion that it is due to disorganisation of the self-schema in depression, and the hypothesis of Beck et al (1979) that depression is characterised by the predominance of a negative self-schema. The expected deficit was observed on the recall but not on the recognition task. However, the precise pattern of the results raises problems for both of the above interpretations, and alternative explanations are considered.