Overgeneral autobiographical memory in children of depressed mothers

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine overgeneral autobiographical memory in a population at-risk for depression (i.e., children of depressed mothers). We predicted that children of depressed mothers would display less-specific memories than children of non-depressed mothers and that these results would be observed among children with no prior history of depression themselves. Participants in this study were children (age 8–14; 50% girls, 83% Caucasian) of mothers with (n = 103) or without (n = 120) a history of major depressive disorder during the child's life. Mothers' and children's diagnoses were confirmed with a diagnostic interview, and children completed the Autobiographical Memory Test and a measure of depressive symptoms. We found that children of depressed mothers, compared to children of non-depressed mothers, recalled less-specific memories in response to negative cue words but not positive cue words. Importantly, these results were maintained even when we statistically controlled for the influence of children's current depressive symptom levels and excluded children with currently depressed mothers. These results suggest that overgeneral autobiographical memory for negative events may serve as a marker of depression risk among high-risk children with no prior depression history.

Keywords:

• Maternal depression
• Overgeneral autobiographical memory
• Intergenerational transmission
• Child depression
• Autobiographical Memory Test

We would like to thank Ashley Johnson, Lindsey Stone, Andrea Hanley, James Choi, Sydney Meadows, and Michael Van Wie for their help in conducting assessments for this project.

This project was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant [HD057066] and National Institute of Mental Health grant [MH098060] awarded to B.E. Gibb.

We would like to thank Ashley Johnson, Lindsey Stone, Andrea Hanley, James Choi, Sydney Meadows, and Michael Van Wie for their help in conducting assessments for this project.

This project was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant [HD057066] and National Institute of Mental Health grant [MH098060] awarded to B.E. Gibb.

Notes

¹ Given that word characteristics such as concreteness and imageability have been associated with OGM (Williams, Healy, & Ellis, 1999), we examined the valence effects on these characteristics. There were no group differences (valence: positive, negative) on concreteness (t(8) = 0.74, p = .49) or imageability (t(8) = –0.33, p = .75) ratings as defined by the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Wilson, 1988).

² Given the literature concerning the unidimensional structure for OGM in adults, we re-examined our preliminary and primary analyses with a focus on overall levels of OGM, collapsed across cue valence. We found that children's age was positively correlated with the total number of specific memories, r = .22, p = .002. In contrast, there were no significant sex differences in children's number of total specific memories, r = .05, p = .43. To examine the influence of maternal MDD history on children's autobiographical memory specificity, we conducted a one-way (mother MDD: yes, no) ANOVA with the total number of specific memories as the dependent variable and children's age as a covariate. The ANOVA revealed no main effect of mother MDD, F(1, 219) = 2.71, p = .11, = .01.