Abstract
Cognitive organization in depression was investigated using a modification of the Stroop Colour-Naming task, which attempted to prime or activate subjects' self-schemata prior to testing. Unipolar Depressed patients (n =14), Anxiety Disorder patients (n =9), and normal controls (n =14) were asked to color-name personal adjectives that had been previously rated as either extremely self-descriptive or neutral. Each experimental trial consisted of the presentation of a prime word followed by a target word printed in color, and the subject's task was to name the color of the target and then recall the prime. Results indicated a significant effect of prime-target relatedness, in that longer color-naming latencies were obtained when the prime and the target were both self-descriptive adjectives than when only the target was self-descriptive and the prime was not. This suggests that information about the self is represented with a higher degree of interconnection than information that is not self-descriptive, and in this sense supports the notion of a cognitive schema about the self. For self-descriptive adjectives alone this effect was significant for the depressed group. Depressed patients were more likely to endorse negative adjectives as self-referent than were nondepressed subjects, suggesting that the content of depressives' self-schemata may be relatively more negative. As a further control, yoked-normal subjects were tested using the same set of stimuli employed for depressed subjects. No relatedness effect emerged, offering evidence that the differences in color-naming latencies reported above may be attributed to the personal relatedness of the words rather than to any semantic properties they possessed.
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This work was supported by grants to the first and third authors from the Laidlaw Foundation and the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation. The authors thank Dr. Frank Cashman for providing referrals to the anxiety control group. The authors would also like to thank Doreen Vella for her help in the preparation of this manuscript, and Dr. Timothy Moore for the generous loan of his laboratory equipment.
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Segal, Z.V., Hood, J.E., Shaw, B.F. et al. A structural analysis of the self-schema construct in major depression. Cogn Ther Res 12, 471–485 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173414
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01173414