When the half-full glass is appraised as half empty and memorised as completely empty: Mood-congruent true and false recognition in depression is modulated by salience

Abstract

Since the 1980s a large body of empirical effort has been devoted to mood-congruent memory (MCM) biases in clinical depression. Whereas there is broad, albeit not unequivocal, evidence that depressive patients retain negative-valenced memory items better than neutral material, few studies have investigated false memories in depression. In a pilot study we gathered support for both enhanced true and false memory for emotional material in depression. The present study aimed to extend these preliminary findings. In view of investigations suggesting that arousing and meaningful stimuli have facilitated access to memory, personal salience was considered a moderator for MCM. In the present study 21 depressed and 22 healthy participants were presented six false memory lists dealing with neutral, negative, and positive themes. At recognition, each item had to be appraised for its degree of valence subsequent to an old-new judgement. Pre-categorised and subjective valence did not discriminate groups. However, relative to controls depressed patients showed both more veridical as well as false recognition for items that concurrently elicited higher salience ratings in patients. In contrast, group differences in recognition performance did not significantly affect salience ratings. Results indicate that salience modulates MCM and may account for discrepancies in the literature.

Larger than life: Overestimation of object size is moderated by personal relevance in obsessive–compulsive disorder

“…This emphasizes our hypothesis that biases are most strongly elicited in OCD when the idiosyncratic nature of the underlying fear is triggered (e.g., Moritz, Voigt, Arzola, & Otte, 2008). To illustrate, patients of the same subtype (e.g., checkers) may have very different obsessions (e.g., concerns about burglary, fire, aggressive acts towards beloved ones) and thus, will react very differently to objects commonly assumed to be checkingrelated (such as locks, an oven, or a knife).…”

“…The conclusion that personal relevance is perhaps more important than valence, has also been drawn for other populations. For example, we found a moodcongruent memory effect in depressed patients only when looking at items that patients deemed personally relevant (Moritz et al, 2008).…”

Visual false memories in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

“…A potential explanation could be that our material in contrast to the material used by Brennen et al (2007) was not specifically more arousing for PTSD patients as indicated by their ratings. As stated in the introduction, arousal may represent a moderating variable for the production of false memories (Corson & Verrier, 2007;Moritz, Voigt, Arzola, & Otte, 2008) and might also explain the results of more falsely recalled trauma-related critical lures in PTSD (cf. Brennen et al, 2007).…”

Memory for emotional images differs according to the presence of depressive symptoms in individuals at risk for dementia

“…Because previous research (e.g. Moritz et al, 2008) has shown that subjective interpretation of emotional stimuli is most strongly related to later recall, and because certain images had been misperceived during encoding, valence was based on participants' subjective ratings. For instance, if a picture was given a valence score of 7 during the study phase and later recalled, it was counted as a "positive recall."…”