title: Are habitual overgeneral recollection and prospection maladaptive?
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Individuals with depression exhibit difficulty retrieving specific memories and imagining specific future events when instructed to do so relative to non-clinical comparison groups. Instead of specific events, depressed individuals frequently retrieve or imagine "overgeneral" memories that span a long period of time or that denote a category of similar events. Recently, Raes, Hermans, Williams, and Eelen (2007) developed a sentence completion procedure (SCEPT) to assess the tendency to recall overgeneral autobiographical memories. They found that specificity on this measure was associated with depression and rumination. We aimed to replicate these findings and to examine the tendency to imagine overgeneral future events.
  
  
  METHODS
  We had 170 subjects complete past (SCEPT) and future-oriented (SCEFT) sentence completion tasks and measures of depression severity, PTSD severity, hopelessness, and repetitive negative thought.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Although specificities of past and future events were correlated, neither SCEPT nor SCEFT specificity was negatively associated with depression severity, posttraumatic stress symptoms, repetitive negative thought (RNT), or hopelessness.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our data are cross-sectional, preventing any determination of causality and limiting our assessment of whether specificity is associated with psychological distress following a stressful life event. In addition, we observed poor internal consistency for both the SCEPT and SCEFT.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings fail to support the hypothesis that overgeneral memory and prospection on these tasks are associated with psychological distress.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. robinaug@fas.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Donald J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Robinaugh
authors.forename: Rebecca E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Lubin
authors.forename: Luka
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Babic
authors.forename: Richard J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: McNally
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology; D055815:Young Adult