Autobiographical episodic memory-based training interventions in patients with major depression

People with depression have impaired cognitive functions and psychological symptoms of depression. Depression is characterized by negative biases in different aspects of information processing that is related to vulnerability for the development, higher levels of depressive symptoms, maintenance and even recurrence of depression. Psychologists believe that memory is the foundation of cognitive psychology. Memory is one of the most important cognitive impairments in patients with depression, and its impairment exacerbates their inability to perform daily functions. autobiographical memory is part of the memory. Research has shown that there is a strong link between psychological symptoms and autobiographical memory bias. Depression can lead to impaired memory so that depressed individuals have difficulty retrieving specific memories. In other words, overgeneralization of autobiographical memory occurs. Considering the importance of this issue in the last two decades, extensive research has been done on the relationship between depression and memory, and memory-based depression treatments, which have sometimes yielded contradictory results. Despite these extensive pharmacological and psychological treatments for depression, there are limitations in comprehensiveness and efficacy of these treatments that leads to the need for more research on depression-related interventions. The present study is a systematic review article that has been collected through a complete study of 45 articles in the field of each of the interventions proposed during the article, history of memory and major depression. The aim of this study was to review autobiographical episodic memory-based training interventions for patients with depression to provide a sketch for more extensive research on each of these interventions. Overall, the studies conducted in this study indicated that episodic autobiographical- based memory training interventions have significant effects on the improvement and depressive symptoms in patients with depression.