title: How are depression and autobiographical memory retrieval related to culture?
abstract: This study investigated how culture influences the association between autobiographical memory retrieval and depression. Thirty clinically depressed patients and 30 controls, 15 each from Britain and Taiwan, completed the English and Chinese versions of the Autobiographical Memory Cueing Task (AMT). Overall, the depressed individuals from both cultural groups retrieved significantly fewer specific and more categoric autobiographical memories than their matched, nondepressed controls. Within the control groups, the British participants retrieved significantly more specific autobiographical memories and fewer categoric memories than their Taiwanese counterparts. These results suggest that difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories typical of depression may be a cognitive bias that occurs across cultures.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews Fife, KY16 9JP, Scotland. bd9@st-andrews.ac.uk
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dritschel
authors.forename: Chih-Mei
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Kao
authors.forename: Arlene
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Astell
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Neufeind
authors.forename: Te-Jen
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Lai
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001362:Avoidance Learning; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003463:Cues; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D012649:Self Concept; D013624:Taiwan; D013850:Thinking; D006113:United Kingdom