Are habitual overgeneral recollection and prospection maladaptive?

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Individuals with depression exhibit difficulty retrieving specific memories and imagining specific future events when instructed to do so relative to non-clinical comparison groups. Instead of specific events, depressed individuals frequently retrieve or imagine "overgeneral" memories that span a long period of time or that denote a category of similar events. Recently, Raes, Hermans, Williams, and Eelen (2007) developed a sentence completion procedure (SCEPT) to assess the tendency to recall overgeneral autobiographical memories. They found that specificity on this measure was associated with depression and rumination. We aimed to replicate these findings and to examine the tendency to imagine overgeneral future events.

METHODS: We had 170 subjects complete past (SCEPT) and future-oriented (SCEFT) sentence completion tasks and measures of depression severity, PTSD severity, hopelessness, and repetitive negative thought.

RESULTS: Although specificities of past and future events were correlated, neither SCEPT nor SCEFT specificity was negatively associated with depression severity, posttraumatic stress symptoms, repetitive negative thought (RNT), or hopelessness.

LIMITATIONS: Our data are cross-sectional, preventing any determination of causality and limiting our assessment of whether specificity is associated with psychological distress following a stressful life event. In addition, we observed poor internal consistency for both the SCEPT and SCEFT.

CONCLUSIONS: These findings fail to support the hypothesis that overgeneral memory and prospection on these tasks are associated with psychological distress.