Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses

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    An investigation of item-memory and source-memory processes in subclinical depression
    SKOVRON, MARISSA ( 2012)
    Source monitoring is a component process of episodic memory that entails remembering when, where and how memories were acquired. Although deficits in episodic memory for item information (recognition/recall of a previously presented item) have been well documented in relation to depressive disorders, to date very little attention has been given to potential deficits in source-monitoring processes. The present study used a self-generated/other-generated source-monitoring task to test the hypothesis that participants experiencing symptoms of depression would demonstrate a trade-off between item- and source-memory performance. Specifically, it was predicted that participants scoring high on the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) would show a mood-congruent enhancement of item-memory recognition for negatively-valenced words (relative to positively-valenced words), but that enhanced attention to the negative items would come at the expense of reduced retrieval of source information (who said what?) for negative words. Additionally, it was predicted that participants experiencing symptoms of depression would show an ‘internalisation bias’ for negative stimuli such that they would tend to make source misattributions to “self” more so than to “other”. Participants (N = 133) first studied 96 auditorily presented target words (half positive, half negative valence). On ‘self-generated’ study trials, participants were required to generate a sentence containing the presented word. On ‘other-generated’ study trials, participants heard the word and then a pre-recorded sentence containing the word. At test, studied words were re-presented visually, intermixed with 96 matched lures.