Performance of Patients with Major Depressive Disorder in False Memory Task

Research data indicates that major depression patients were suffering from deficits in cognitive functions such as memory, attention, information processing. False memory in depression is a challenging issue in this area of research. Investigation of auditory and visual false memory in these patients is the purpose of present article. The selected samples in this causal-compa ative study include 21 patients suffering from major depression according to DSMIV-TR criteria and 21 normal subjects who were matched by age, sex, and socio-economic status. The instruments were included the Beck’s Depression Inventory, the Beck’s Anxiety Inventory, the Visual and Verbal False Memories Tasks which prepared according to the Deese-Roediger- McDe mott’s (DRM) paradigm. The results indicate that depressed patients produced more false memories (both verbal and visual) than the normal control subjects in both verbal and visual tasks. The findings of this research are interpretable within the framework of the cognitive theories of depression.