Adolescents at risk of mental health problems recall more bad memories
Submitted by Alice Roe
Autobiographical memory – our ability to recall personal experiences – is central to daily life. It helps us plan for the future, connect with others, and shapes how we think about ourselves. Differences in multiple areas of autobiographical memory processing are associated with mental health in adulthood, but we know less about these processes during adolescence.
In this study, 318 adolescents aged 16-18-years-old at high and low risk of affective disorders (depression, anxiety and PTSD) completed the ‘Good-Day Bad-Day Task’. Participants were given two minutes each to recall as many ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’ from their past as they could, and also rated how they felt about each memory at the time of the event and in the present.
We found that adolescents at low risk recalled a greater number of ‘good day’ than ‘bad day’ memories and that the negative emotion associated with their ‘bad day’ memories faded faster than the positive emotion associated with ‘good day’ memories, a phenomenon known as the Fading Affect Bias. However, while at risk adolescents also showed evidence of these positive biases in memory recall, they were significantly reduced, and they also recalled more ‘bad day’ memories than low risk participants.
These findings suggest that positive biases in memory recall play a key role in supporting mental health in adolescence, with worse mental health associated with the increased access to negative memories. Supporting young people to recall and hold onto positive past experiences may be beneficial in reducing mental health risk.
I’m a young person – what does this mean for me?
How we think about the past can play a key role in shaping our mental health. This study suggests that thinking about the past with a positive bias – remembering good memories more easily than bad ones – may be particularly protective for mental health. Although more research is needed, this suggests that focusing on recalling positive memories may be helpful in improving wellbeing.
I’m a clinician – what does this mean for me?
Findings suggest that differences in autobiographical memory recall may be a transdiagnostic marker of risk of affective disorder. While interventions targeting memory specificity have gained traction in the last decade, these results suggest that augmenting such approaches to focus on other domains of memory recall, including supporting adolescents to recall repeated sets of specific positive memories, and to focus on the positive emotion associated with such memories, may be fruitful.