Self-referent information-processing in individuals at high and low cognitive risk for depression

Whereas prior work has demonstrated that depressed persons exhibit preferential processing of negative self-referent information, the present study investigated whether persons who are cognitively vulnerable to depression show similar negative self-referent processing. Nondepressed participants in the Temple-Wisconsin Cognitive Vulnerability to Depression Project who were at hypothesised high or low cognitive risk for depression based on their dysfunctional attitudes and inferential styles were administered a Self-referent Information Processing Task Battery that yielded five information-processing measures: judgements of self-descriptiveness (''Me/Not Me'') of trait words; response times for these judgements; past behavioural examples for self-descriptive words; future behavioural predictions; and correct recall of the trait words. Each dependent measure yielded scores for four types of stimuli in a Valence x Content design: positive and negative stimuli that were either relevant or irrelevant to a depressive self-concept. Consistent with prediction, relative to low cognitive risk participants, high cognitive risk participants exhibited greater processing of negative seif-referent information and less processing of positive self-referent information on all measures. Moreover, there was some evidence that risk group differences in self-referent processing biases were greater for depression-relevant than for depression-irrelevant content domains. The findings are discussed with respect to theoretical and methodological implications for the cognitive theories of depression.