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Objectives: The ability to think about future events serves a range of important functions. People with schizophrenia show impairments in future thinking. However, whether these impairments are specific to positive or negative events and to what extent they are associated with impairments in verbal fluency and autobiographical memory remains poorly understood. Methods: People with schizophrenia (n = 93) and people without psychiatric diagnoses (n = 111) were asked to generate future events and retrieve past autobiographical events and they also completed a test of verbal fluency. Participants also completed questionnaire measures of the positive and negative dimensions of schizophrenia and depression symptoms. Results: People with schizophrenia generated significantly fewer positive and negative future events than controls. In a linear regression, the interaction between diagnosis and autobiographical memory retrieval explained a significant amount of variance in the number of future events that participants generated even when accounting for symptoms and verbal fluency. Past and future thinking abilities were correlated in controls but not in people with schizophrenia. Conclusions: People with schizophrenia may not rely on autobiographical content to imagine the future and may rely instead on semantic processes. Interventions that improve past and future thinking amongst people with schizophrenia are warranted. Practitioner points: Compared to control participants, people with schizophrenia have marked difficulty generating possible, positive and negative, future events.Unlike controls, for people with schizophrenia there is no relation between their ability to remember past events and their ability to think about the future.People with schizophrenia may have difficulty using their memories for their past to imagine and simulate possible future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the higher prevalence of depression in women than in men, the study of the variables that underlie this gender difference becomes important for both the prevention and the treatment of depression. This study explores gender differences in the relationship between depressive symptoms, rumination, repressive coping, and overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) in a nonclinical population. There are 141 men and 148 women who completed the measures of depression, rumination, and repression, and the Autobiographical Memory Test to assess OGM. Women remembered a higher number of specific memories than men. Most importantly, results showed a different pattern of association between rumination, repression, depression, and OGM by gender. Depressive symptoms were associated with repressive coping and OGM in women. However, depressive symptomatology was related to repressive coping but not to OGM in men. These results suggest that the role of OGM in depression may be less important in men than in women. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to compare the performance in the Autobiographical Memory Test in older adults with high scores on depression symptoms (HDS) compared with a matched group with low scores on depression symptoms (LDS) according to the clinical cut-off of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Participants were asked to generate specific autobiographical memories in response to a series of positive and negative cue words. Latencies of responses for each item were also scored. LDS participants showed a higher proportion of specific memories than HDS participants. Latencies of responses to positive and negative cues were greater for HDS than LDS. Specific autobiographical memory was positively associated with Life Satisfaction. Cognitive emotional changes in the function of memory with age are suggested as a possible explanation for the findings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]