Specificity of autobiographical memory and mood disturbance in adolescents

The difficulty in retrieving specific memories to cue words on the autobiographical memory test has been found to be associated with a number of psychiatric disorders: depression, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, and acute stress disorder, as well as certain forms of behaviour, notably parasuicide. This preliminary study extends the study of autobiographical memory into an adolescent population. Adolescents from a residential inpatient facility completed the autobiographical memory test alongside measures of depression and hopelessness. Their data were compared with normative data collected from a school sample. The clinical group, who were more depressed and hopeless than the normative comparison group, were less specific in their response to cue words on the autobiographical memory test. This result is comparable to that found in adult clinical groups. Unusually for studies of autobiographical memory, a positive correlation was found between specificity, depression and hopelessness in the clinical group, with the more depressed and hopeless participants being more specific. Recall of specific memories in response to negative cues tended to be associated with hopelessness in both males and females. Post-hoc analyses suggested that this was a consequence of a number of adolescents in the clinical group who had a history of parasuicidal behaviour tending to recall the same traumatic memory to more than one cue word.