Directed forgetting and memory bias for emotion-congruent information in clinical depression

We compared depressed and control participants on a directed forgetting task using depressive, threatening, positive, and neutral words. Items were presented one at a time, and immediately followed by the instruction either to remember or to forget the word. All participants then performed a free recall task and a recognition task on all previously presented words. Depressed participants were similar to controls in their response patterns, except for an overall impairment in recognition performance. We discuss these results in the light of Bower's associative network (1981), Beck's cognitive theory (1967, 1979), and Williams, Watts, MacLeod, and Mathews's theory (1988, 1997).