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Abstract
During the past years many researchers have focused their attention on autobiographical memory and its deficits in clinical samples suffering of emotional disturbance. The aim of this research was to study autobiographical memory functioning in anorexia nervosa patients, taking into account the duration of illness, the subjective evaluation and the date of the recalled memory, the pleasantness of the recalled memory and the level of depression. Patients with restrictive anorexia nervosa were compared with a group of healthy teenagers using the Autobiographical Memory Test, the Child Depression Inventory and the Eating Disorder Inventory. Anorexic girls recalled more general (extended and categoric) memories than the controls for each type of cue word (positive, negative and neutral), suggesting a general difficulty in the access to emotional memories.
Keywords: anorexia nervosa, autobiographical memory, specific memory, depression
Introduction
In the past few decades a new line of research focusing on autobiographical memories has drawn increasing attention of scientists all over the world (Healey & Williams, 1999). Autobiographical memory refers to memories with personal content retrieved easily by the individual, that are not part of a generic script or semantic memory, but which form individual autobiography (Swales & Williams, 2001). The dominant paradigm for assessing autobiographical memory - the autobiographical memory test (AMT) - was developed by Williams and Broadbent (1986). They studied patients a few days after they had been hospitalized for a serious suicide attempt. These individuals were asked to retrieve specific autobiographical memories to positive or negative cue words (e.g., happy, angry). A specific memory is defined as 'something that happened at a particular place and time and took no longer than a day to occur'(for example, "Last Sunday when I went out for a coffee with Mary"). Responses were compared to normal controls. Despite the fact that they were asked to retrieve specific memories, the overdose patients tended, as a first response to the cues, to retrieve more inappropriately general memories than controls (For example: "When I am with Mary". These general memories can be further qualified as categoric general memories, referring to events that occur often, and extended general memories, referring to events that last more than one day, or no memories (semantic associations) and no response or same event.
Several studies found...