Affect and memory in depression: evidence of better delayed recall of positive than negative affect words

It is widely accepted that depressives focus on negative memories, and forget or repress positive memories (showing a mood-congruent affective tendency). Normals have an opposite positive bias in memory ('Pollyanna tendency'). Research evidence for depressives' negative bias in memory comes mainly from studies of retrieval of personal experiences during depression, or from studies of such retrieval during induced mood. In the present study, the hypothesis that depressives encode and remember negative emotion materials better than other materials was tested. Contrary to the hypothesis, the results showed that severely depressed patients remembered more positive affect than negative affect words, after a 2-day delay. Depressives' overall memory performance and rate of forgetting were poor, similar to schizophrenics', and worse than normals'. The results suggest that, while memory performance during a depressive episode is poor, the memory consolidation process for affective information is normal. Unlike in schizophrenia, it does not select negative emotion materials. This conclusion is not incongruent with the finding that depressives show mood-congruent retrieval for previously learnt personal (experiential) information. The consolidation of non-personal (nonexperiential) positive affect materials during depression may provide a clue as to the mechanism of recovery in depression, and the lack of such recovery in schizophrenia.