Nate Cohn
Reduced specificity in autobiographical memory has been linked to Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Regardless of the valence of the cue word, it has been suggested that this propensity results from a lack of effortful creative retrieval. However, we argue that in MDD, general memories are more likely to be recalled directly, and that this is more likely for signals with a negative valence. An extensive sample of people with MDD took the autobiographical memory test and indicated whether or not the retrievals were generative or direct as a preliminary test of this. Positively valenced cues were more frequently retrieved directly than generatively, while negatively valenced cues were more frequently recovered directly than generatively.