Implicit Mood Congruent Memory Bias in Subclinical Depression

Prior literature reports that the activation of conceptual processing is necessary, albeit insufficient, for the detection of implicit mood congruent memory bias. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of self-referential processing on this bias in individuals with subclinical depression. Two groups of participants (subclinical depressed vs. non-depressed) were given a perceptive or conceptual implicit memory task involving adjectives that varied in terms of their emotional valence and the manner in which they had been encoded. Our main finding was that those individuals with subclinical depression recorded a bias in the conceptual task, but only when they had encoded the content in a more self-referential manner. The findings are consistent with the activation of cognitive self-schema during the processing of emotional information of a self-referential nature in subclinical depression.