Title: Transient Autobiographical Memory Enhancement to Improve Everyday Cognitive Skills
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Depression affects almost 20% of adults. If you don't experience depression yourself, it's likely that someone you care about does. The best psychological 'talking therapy' for depression is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - commonly referred to as 'CBT'. Although CBT helps with depression, around half of people who complete a course of CBT still have depressive symptoms. This has a huge impact on the individuals' quality of life, their families, and the economy. It is therefore vitally important that we improve psychological therapies like CBT so that more people can beat depression. One way of trying to improve CBT is to use experimental, cognitive psychology to find out what stops CBT working. Research has shown that certain styles of remembering or thinking about things interfere with how well people respond to CBT. If we can find a way to change these 'cognitive problems', then CBT should work better at shifting depression. One such cognitive problem occurs when people struggle to remember details about events from their past - what we call autobiographical memories. Being able to easily bring to mind detailed autobiographical memories is very important for a number of everyday mental skills essential to our psychological health. We need good access to detailed autobiographical memories to successfully solve everyday problems, to make accurate judgements about ourselves and the world around us, and to see both positive and negative things that might happen whenever we plan how to deal with a challenging experience (e.g., working hard to meet a deadline at work). When someone experiences depression, the autobiographical memories they bring to mind are often very vague and broad and negative (e.g., my life has always been awful). People with depression find it very hard to reach those detailed autobiographical memories that they need to navigate everyday life, which keeps their depression going. How does this relate to CBT? Well, those everyday skills of problem-solving, sound judgement, and careful planning that require good access to autobiographical memories, are the very same skills we need in order to successfully engage with CBT. For instance, a common task in CBT for depression is to identify the negative thoughts that keep depression going (e.g., I never do well at anything) and then gather 'evidence' from the person's life to show that the thoughts aren't true (e.g. last week I cooked a nice meal). However, this evidence-gathering critically relies on being able to remember past events that contradict the thoughts. So, problems with autobiographical memory may not only keep depression going, but may also interfere with CBT that is designed to treat depression. In this project we want to develop and test a new technique that can temporarily boosts people's ability to access their detailed autobiographical memories. We will then determine that improving autobiographical memory in this way then improves those problem-solving, judgement and planning skills that depend on autobiographical memories. Finally, we will test whether this booster technique improves depressed people's ability to do tasks that are similar to CBT, such as challenging negative thoughts. If our technique works, in the future we could provide depressed people a way to 'switch on' a detailed way of remembering things that they can use before a CBT session in order to get the most out of therapy. In this way, this project will use laboratory work with depressed volunteers to explore a new technique that could help to improve treatments for depression in the future. Our key goals, then, are to: 1) Develop a technique to boost access to detailed autobiographical memories in depressed people; 2) Evaluate whether this memory booster technique improves both a) everyday mental skills like solving problems, and planning, and b) depressed people's ability to successfully complete the sorts of tasks that they would be asked to do in CBT.


Research activity codes: 5.6 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIOURAL
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH