Metacognitive Rehabilitation of Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory

Rashmi Gupta, Centre for Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad, Allahabad 211002, India, email: [email protected]. Autobiographical memory is the ability to remember past events from one’s own life. Although personal memories have always been a topic of interest among nonspecialists, they also have been the subject of several interesting psychological studies. One reason these types of memories are interesting is that they are about the individual and his or her unique history. These memories also can tell us quite a lot about an individual’s personality and concept of self. The topic of autobiographical memory has begun to attract substantial research attention among experimental psychologists. Research has examined its nature and function (Rubin, 1996); it’s role in organizing one’s sense of self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000); and the aspects that are affected by neurological damage (Conway & Fthenaki, 2000; Rugg & Wilding, 2000). Interestingly, a particular recent line of research in autobiographical memory, with a clinically oriented focus, concentrates on that very aspect of specificity with which personal or autobiographical memories are retrieved. It has been widely established that depressed mood states and clinical depression, as well as range of other psychiatric disorders, are associated with a relative difficulty in accessing specific autobiographical information in response to emotionrelated cue words on Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT). This phenomenon is termed as overgeneral memory which is closely associated with the psychopathology of emotion. The focus of this article is on the phenomena of overgeneral autobiographical memory, which has four sections. First section discusses the phenomena of overgeneral autobiographical memory and its relation with psychopathology of emotion. Second part describes the underlying mechanism of overgeneral autobiographical memory, especially role of reduced executive control in overgeneral memory. Third section talks about the need for the modification of overgeneral memory. Fourth section describes the role of metacognitive thinking/metacognitive regulation in enhancement of executive control, which can in turn facilitate the specificity of autobiographical memory.