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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]

Schizophrenia is characterised by difficulty understanding the thoughts and intentions of other people. Misunderstandings could lead people to attribute hostility to others' actions. Theories suggest that we use our autobiographical memories to inform our understanding of other people but no study has examined the relation between memory and hostile attributions in schizophrenia. People with (n = 42) and without (n = 34) schizophrenia diagnoses completed The Ambiguous Intentions and Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ) to assess their tendency to attribute hostility to other people's actions and the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) to assess their ability to recall specific positive and negative autobiographical memories. In linear regressions the interaction between diagnostic group and the proportion of specific negative memories participants retrieved explained significant variance in each AIHQ index. Follow-up correlation analyses showed that participants with schizophrenia who retrieved more negative memories also attributed greater hostility to other people's actions (r = 0.47) and reported that they would respond with greater aggression (r = 0.59). These correlations were in the opposite direction for controls. People with schizophrenia may use their memories for negative past events to understand the actions and intentions of other people, leading to attributions of hostility for otherwise benign actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with schizophrenia diagnoses are thought to have difficulty retrieving memories of specific autobiographical events because of attempts to avoid the negative affect associated with previous adversity. We provide the first investigation of the association between early adversity (e.g., childhood abuse) and autobiographical memory problems amongst people with and without schizophrenia. Participants with diagnoses of schizophrenia (n = 79) and participants without diagnoses (n = 41) completed the Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure (MACE) interview schedule and a cued recall task. Participants exposed to greater number of, and more severe, childhood adversity retrieved fewer specific autobiographical memories. However, participants with schizophrenia retrieved fewer specific memories than control participants without diagnoses irrespective of the presence, severity or number of adversities they experienced. Adversity contributes towards autobiographical memory difficulty but adversity does not explain why people with schizophrenia differ from diagnoses-free people in their autobiographical memory abilities. • More severe adversity was associated with recall of fewer specific memories. • Higher number of adversities also associated with worse recall. • These effects did not differ for memories retrieved by positive or negative cues. • Participants with schizophrenia recalled fewer specific memories than controls. • This difference was independent of adversity severity or multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]