The degree to which the self is implicated in processing personal information was investigated. Subjects rated adjectives on four tasks designed to force varying kinds of encoding: structural, phonemic, semantic, and self-reference. In two experiments, incidental recall of the rated words indicated that adjectives rates under the self-reference task were recalled the best. These results indicate that self-reference is a rich and powerful encoding process. As an aspect of the human information-processing system, the self appears to function as a superordinate schema that is deeply involved in the processing, interpretation, and memory of personal information.

Differences in self-schema content among 16 clinical depressives, 16 nondepressed psychiatric control patients, and 16 normal nondepressives (women between the ages of 18 and 65) were investigated by having subjects make structural (Small letters?), semantic (Means same as a given word?), and self-referent (Describes you?) ratings on depressed-and nondepressed-content personal adjectives. These ratings were then followed immediately by an incidental recall period in which subjects recalled as many of the adjectives as possible. In accord with predictions generated from a self-as-schema model, adjective recall was greater overall for the self-referent rating task, relative to the structural and semantic tasks. Furthermore, consistent with the content-specificity component of this self-schema model, both normal and nondepressed psychiatric controls displayed superior recall only for self-referenced, nondepressed-content adjectives. Also consistent with the content-specificity component of this model, clinical depressives displayed significantly enhanced recall only for depressed-content adjectives rated under the self-referent task. In combination with rating time findings, these results offer empirical support for Beck's proposal that an efficient negative self-schema exists, specific to the disorder of depression.

Self-other differences in processing personal information were investigated by having subjects make self-referent (describes you?) or other-referent (describes experimenter?) ratings of personal adjectives. Results from five studies indicated that self-ratings were 'consistently judged as easier to make, and subjects always placed more confidence in these judgments. An analysis of rating •times showed that only adjectives with long rating times were recalled for the unknown-other-referent task (Experiments 2 and 3). In contrast, the recalled words for the self-referent task had very short rating times. This difference is explained via a "two-process" interpretation. Unknown-other-referent processing involves a relatively inefficient rehearsal or effort strategy, whereas self-referent processing involves the self as a highly organized and efficient schema. Finally, the effects of familiarity on other-referent processing were examined. A model of other processing is formulated to account for the observed changes in processing information about a familiar other (Experiments 4 and 5).The theoretical notion of prototype or schema has been advanced to account for the findings mentioned above. For example, Markus (1977) postulates that a person's organization, summation, and explanation of personal data involve the use of "self-schemata," which are "cognitive generalizations

The present research investigated the extent to which mild depressives and normals differed in their self-referent processing of personal information. In Experiment 1, these subjects made two types of ratings on depressed (e.g., bleak, dismal) and nondepressed (e.g., loyal, organized) content personal adjectives. Half of the adjectives in each content category were rated for a semantic attribute (Does this word have a specific meaning or relate to a specific situation?), whereas half were rated for degree of self-reference (Does this word describe you?). These ratings were followed immediately by an incidental recall task, in which subjects recalled as many of the adjectives as possible. Consistent with predictions generated from a content-specific self-schema model, normals displayed superior recall for self-referenced nondepressed content adjectives, when compared to recall for self-referenced depressed content adjectives and recall for semantic ratings (both depressed and nondepressed content). In contrast, mild depressives exhibited enhanced self-referent recall for both types of content, when compared to their recall for semantic adjectives. This finding suggested that mild depressives utilize a self-schema which incorporates both depressed and nondepressed content. Experiment 2 explored this suggestion further by substituting an other-referent rating task (Does this word describe Pierre Trudeau?) for the semantic judgment used in Experiment 1. Again, consistent with a content-specific self-schema model, normals displayed superior recall only for self-referenced nondepressed adjectives. Mild depressives, however, showed enhanced self-referent recall, relative to other-referent recall, only for depressed content adjectives. For nondepressed content, mild depressives did not distinguish between the self- and other-referent conditions. This finding hinted that the nondepressed component of the mild depressive's self-schema may operate at a somewhat reduced effectiveness, but only when required to differentiate between self and others.

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