Self-referent rating of personality trait adjectives in mild depression

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether those who were mildly depressed and those who were not differed in termes of their self-referent processing of personal information. Twenty-four undergraduates, 12 mildly depressed and 12 normal controls, performed two types of rating tasks, structural and self-referent, on personality adjectives. The adjectives were either related to depression or not. Immediately after the rating tasks, subjects recalled as many adjectives as possible in an incidental memory task. Main results were as follows: (1) The mildly depressed showed longer response latency than the controls in making self-referent ratings, but no difference in latency was found for structural ratings. (2) Both mildly depressed and normal controls recalled more adjectives for the self-referent rating task than the structural one, and recalled more adjectives that were not related to depression than those that were.