Capture and rumination, functional avoidance, and executive control (CaRFAX): Three processes that underlie overgeneral memory

Abstract

This article reviews the papers published in this Special Issue of Cognition and Emotion on Specificity in Autobiographical Memory. Together, the studies address some critical issues relating to the etiology of and mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of overgeneral memory. In terms of etiology, there is now substantial evidence of links between overgeneral memory and current or past depression, and between overgeneral memory and trauma history, and suicidal ideation and behaviour, independent of depression. In terms of mechanisms, three factors are emerging as the critical mechanisms underlying the phenomenon: Capture and rumination (CaR), functional avoidance (FA), and executive control dysfunction (X). Each of these has separately been found to produce overgenerality in memory; together they are almost certain to do so.

Notes

Professor Williams' research is supported by the Wellcome Trust GR067797. The author wishes to thank Thorsten Barnhofer and Catherine Crane for help with this article.

It may be of note that in the original Williams and Broadbent (1986) study, we had also looked at field/observer perspective but did not report any data in that paper because we found the test‐retest reliability to be very poor indeed. That is, asking nondepressed participants to give the perspective judgement (“field” or “observer”) of the same event 4 weeks apart yielded almost as many changes in perspective as there were stable perspectives, with the same event being rated on one occasion “field” and on the next “observer” and vice versa. We concluded that these ratings were not stable enough to be reliable enough for further investigation.

The authors mention that retrieval‐induced inhibition may be a better explanation for overgenerality of memory than an affect regulation explanation: Why would an affect regulation system fail with the very memories that they are intended to deal with? However, the very reason why our patients have problems is because normal mechanisms have failed. Another example would be behavioural avoidance, aimed to reduce anxiety but increases it, or thought suppression, where normal attempts to suppress or avoid thinking about things, which might work very well in most people, fails to work in some. These are the people who come to us for help. Affect regulation does not refer to the phenomena we see but the causes or mechanism through which the phenomena we see have developed, especially when, as happens in our patients, things have gone wrong. This is not to argue that the affect regulation mechanism and resulting mnemonic interlock is the only possible explanation for over‐general memory (see later), but that we see in the clinic many examples of a mechanism that has evolved to be effective for most people but which, when it breaks down, produces many clinical phenomena.

Note that this study did not simply take a medium split on a measure of depression, but sampled the highest 20% and the lowest 20% for the depression subscales of the Mood and Anxiety Symptoms Questionnaire. It is quite likely that many of the students in the dysphoric group would have met criteria for major depression or a previous episode of major depression. A recent sample of students from our own collaborative research with Leiden University found 16% met a current diagnosis of major depression.