Emotional Disturbance and the Specificity of Autobiographical Memory

Williams and Broadbent (1986) found that patients who had recently attempted suicide showed not only biased latencies to retrieve autobiographical memories, but were more over-general in their responses, especially in response to positive cues. That is, they were likely to give memories referring to people, places, or activities where a time period was not referred to or was greater than one day. Further research is reported which replicates and extends the phenomenon of over-general recall. First, a further sample of overdose patients shows the same tendency to give general rather than specific memories. Secondly, ex-patients who have taken an overdose between 3 and 14 months prior to the testing occasion remain significantly more over-general in their memories than normal controls, but show a normal pattern of being relatively more specific in response to positive than to negative cue words. The phenomenon is discussed in relation to a "descriptions" framework which suggests that to encode or retrieve autobiographical information, a partial description is formed which provides an initial entry point into memory. Over-general recall may represent a combination of preferential encoding of these general contexts and difficulties in deriving and using mnemonic cues at retrieval to search memory for specific episodes. The clinical implications of the phenomena are discussed.