SELF-REFERENT INFORMATION-PROCESSING IN INDIVIDUALS AT HIGH AND LOW COGNITIVE RISK FOR DEPRESSION

Whereas prior work has demonstrated that depressed persons exhibit pre ferential processing of negative self-referent information, the presen t study investigated whether persons who are cognitively vulnerable to depression show similar negative self-referent processing. Nondepress ed participants in the Temple-Wisconsin Cognitive Vulnerability to Dep ression Project who were at hypothesised high or low cognitive risk fo r depression based on their dysfunctional attitudes and inferential st yles were administered a Self-referent Information Processing Task Bat tery that yielded five information-processing measures: judgements of self-descriptiveness (''Me/Not Me'') of trait words; response times fo r these judgements; past behavioural examples for self-descriptive wor ds; future behavioural predictions; and correct recall of the trait wo rds. Each dependent measure yielded scores for four types of stimuli i n a Valence x Content design: positive and negative stimuli that were either relevant or irrelevant to a depressive self-concept. Consistent with prediction, relative to low cognitive risk participants, high co gnitive risk participants exhibited greater processing of negative sei f-referent information and less processing of positive self-referent i nformation on all measures. Moreover, there was some evidence that ris k group differences in self-referent processing biases were greater fo r depression-relevant than for depression-irrelevant content domains. The findings are discussed with respect to theoretical and methodologi cal implications for the cognitive theories of depression.