Reality monitoring and major depression.

摘要

Cognitive theories of depression suggest that mood disorders are both related to information processing biases and associated with cognitive distortions. Although much research evinces depressive biases in cognition, most errors in depressive cognition are errors of omission rather than commission. However, the term cognitive distortion suggests that errors of commission should also be found in people with mood disorders. The present study attempted to demonstrate an error of commission by examining a reality monitoring bias that may be associated with depression. Reality monitoring is a cognitive process in which people discriminate information generated from external stimulation from information generated from internal processes. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that depressed persons would show an increased rate of errors for negative information during a reality monitoring task. Four groups were recruited with newspaper advertisements: (1) Participants with a mood disorder (n = 11), (2) participants with comorbid anxiety and depression (n = 9), (3) participants with one or more anxiety disorders (n = 17), and (4) psychopathology-free controls (n = 31). Participants studied positive, negative, and neutral words. On half of the trials, the participant read words aloud, and on the other half of the trials the words were read by an experimenter. In a subsequent test of recognition memory, participants were asked to identify "old" and "new" words, and to make source judgments (i.e., "self" or "other") for each word judged as old. Participants with a mood disorder were found to exhibit a bias for both positive and negative words that were read by the "other" person. These results suggest that people with mood disorders may have strong cognitive associations between emotional words, and self-generated, elaborative processes.