Schematic processing and self-reference in clinical depression.

Abstract

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.

Emotion Context Insensitivity in Major Depressive Disorder.

“…Indeed, the self-system of depressed individuals has been described as a highly interconnected network of negative content (Beck, 1967;Beck et al, 1979), and negative self-referential effects have been demonstrated in a large number of cognitive tasks. For example, in adjective rating tasks, depressed participants have been found to endorse more negative and fewer positive adjectives as self-descriptive than do nonpsychiatric control participants (e.g., Derry & Kuiper, 1981). It stands to reason that if idiographic stimuli differentially activate depressed persons' negative selfschemas, these stimuli should produce a more severe dysphoric state in depressed persons (i.e., more reported sadness and less reported happiness) than would normative comparison stimuli.…”

Uniqueness of the self-concept across the life span

“…Recent research has shown that systematic distortions of the self-concept may restrict the benefits to be derived from self-comparisons to only certain material consistent with the distortion or may possibly eliminate such benefits altogether. For example, Davis and Unruh (1981) and Derry and Kuiper (1981) have examined self-referencing in depressed subjects and have found that depressives either show no benefits from self-comparisons, allegedly due to an unstable self-concept, or show processing benefits only for material consistent with a depressed self-image, presumably indicating a stable self-concept organized around a nonnormal focus. In terms of a content limitation, it might be that elderly subjects would benefit only from material related specifically to the aging component of the self-concept (e.g., retirement, illness, loneliness, isolation, etc.)…”

Adjetivos en castellano de contenido depresivo autoreferente y de contenido neutral : normas de emocionalidad y frecuencia subjetiva de uso

“…En ocasiones, la selección se ha basado simplemente en el juicio de expertos (p.ej., Mogg y Mathevi's, 1990; Medina, 1997), de los propios experimentadores (p.ej., Foa, McNally y Murdock, 1989) o en el juicio que los propios sujetos emiten en algún momento del proceso sobre el significado connotativo o denotativo de las palabras (p.ej., Derry y Kuiper, 1981;Ingram, Lumry, Cruet, y Sieber, 1987; Blanch y Baños, 1996). En otras ocasiones, las palabras utilizadas se han extraído directamente de instrumentos de personalidad, inventarios de sínto-mas, o cualquier instrumento de evaluación que emplee términos relacionados con el constructo bajo estudio.…”