Emotion Research Group, Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 7EF, England.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2011 Feb;120(1):1-15. doi: 10.1037/a0020797.
This study assessed the organization of past autobiographical knowledge in individuals with either current major depressive disorder (MDD), MDD in remission, or no history of MDD (the control group). Participants generated personal lists of "life chapters," dividing both their past and potential future into subjectively meaningful episodes or themes (e.g., "married life"). They were then given a list of potentially chapter-descriptive positive or negative attributes and sorted them according to the different chapters. Results revealed that, relative to the control group, MDD participants selected more negative attributes overall, showed greater redundancy for negative attributes (i.e., using the same ones repeatedly across chapters) and reduced redundancy for positive attributes, and exhibited greater compartmentalization (i.e., the negative and positive attributes were clustered separately across different chapters). A similar pattern emerged for the remitted MDD group relative to controls, with the exception of negative redundancy, which was not elevated. For future chapters, there were no group differences. Finally, a greater number of past depressive episodes was associated with increasingly reduced positive redundancy. These data reveal a "depressogenic" structuring of past (but not future) knowledge in MDD that is also evident in a remitted MDD group, with the exception of negative redundancy, which appears to be a marker of the acute state. These findings shed light on important aspects of the organization of past knowledge that are likely to be linked to maladaptive processing biases in those with a depression history.
这项研究评估了当前患有重度抑郁症（MDD）、缓解期 MDD 或无 MDD 病史（对照组）的个体过去自传体知识的组织情况。参与者生成个人生活章节列表，将过去和潜在的未来分为主观有意义的事件或主题（例如“婚姻生活”）。然后，他们会收到一份可能描述章节的积极或消极属性列表，并根据不同的章节对其进行排序。结果表明，与对照组相比，MDD 参与者总体上选择了更多的消极属性，在消极属性上表现出更大的冗余（即，在不同章节中重复使用相同的属性），而在积极属性上的冗余减少，并且表现出更大的分区化（即，消极和积极属性分别在不同章节中聚类）。缓解期 MDD 组相对于对照组也出现了类似的模式，除了消极冗余没有增加。对于未来章节，各组之间没有差异。最后，过去抑郁发作次数越多，积极冗余减少得越多。这些数据揭示了 MDD 中过去（而非未来）知识的“抑郁形成”结构，在缓解期 MDD 组中也存在这种结构，除了消极冗余，它似乎是急性状态的标志。这些发现揭示了过去知识组织的重要方面，这些方面可能与有抑郁病史的人适应性加工偏差有关。
