Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Korkutmaz S. İ., Koç S. T., UZER YILDIZ T.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2020 - 2021
"Ability to remember a personal experience as a single, specific episode with its main elements (i.e., who were there, what we were doing, what were the objects with us, etc) is an important predictor of depression (Williams & Broadbent, 1986). The way we remember our past experiences is related to how we imagine our future (Sumner, 2012) as well, because in order to imagine a future scenario, details of specific past experiences should be brought together with novel events (Schacter & Madore, 2016). There are two lines of research in the literature supporting the idea that difficulty in retrieving specific memories (i.e, overgeneral memory phenomenon –OGM-) is associated with difficulty in setting specific goals.One research line suggests that depressed people tend to overgeneralize negative experiences in their lives and that this tendency is associated with increasing depressive symptoms (Dalgleish & Brewin, 2007, Moore & Zoellner, 2007, Williams, van Vreeswijk & de Vilde, 2004). Another line of the research indicates that depressed patients set less specific goals for future as compared to non-depressed people (Dickson & Moberly, 2013).Yet, we don’t know the direction of the relationship between overgeneral memory and difficulty in setting specific goals because all related research is correlational. The present study aims to clarify the causal relationship between memory specificity and goal specificity in depressive and non-depressive populations. One hundred twenty-eight individuals between 18 and 22 years old, who have scored 22 points or above from Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and 128 individuals with the same age range, who have scored 9 points or below from BDI will be participated to the study. There will be four experimental conditions. In specificsuccess condition, each participant will be asked to retrieve a specific personal memory in response to the cue word “success”. After the memory retrieval task, each participant will be asked to list their goals. Specific-failure condition will be different from specific-success condition in that participants will be cued with the word “failure” instead of success. In general-success condition, participants will be asked to retrieve a general memory in response to “success” cue word. In general-failure group, participants will retrieve failure related general memory. Both general groups will alsoasked to list their future goals as well. To control for the possible role of mood on goal setting, participants moods will also be measured on multiple times during the experiment.If difficulty in retrieving specific memory causes difficulty in generating specific goals we would expect more specific goals in specific groups than in general groups. Furthermore, we would expect an interaction between memory valence (i.e. failure vs success), memory specificity (i.e., specific versus general) and participant mood (i.e., depressed versus non-depressed) such that failure-related general memories in depressed group would result in least number of specific goals. The present study will be the first experimental study investigating the causal relationship between memory specificity and goal specificity. Understanding these relationships will contribute to our understanding why depression is related to overgeneral memory and pessimistic future projections."