Paper Agent CC BY 3.0

The devil's in the detail: Accessibility of specific personal memories supports rose-tinted self-generalizations in mental health and toxic self-generalizations in clinical depression.

Caitlin Hitchcock; Catrin Rees; Tim Dalgleish

Publication record checked · 2026-09-30

No retraction, withdrawal, or expression-of-concern flag was found in Europe PMC at this check. This is a source-status check, not an assessment of research quality.

Live workspace

Ask the licensed paper

Ready now

Ask this paper

Ready · 177 searchable passages · Repository extract

Paper Agent

Agent platform credit

Dr. Freedom Cheteni · Editor in Chief

Research University Journal · JournalOS conception and editorial stewardship

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3507-0094

This ORCID identifies the human contributor to the agent platform. Source-paper authors retain their own authorship and identifiers.

Attribution · TASL

Title: The devil's in the detail: Accessibility of specific personal memories supports rose-tinted self-generalizations in mental health and toxic self-generalizations in clinical depression.
Author: Caitlin Hitchcock; Catrin Rees; Tim Dalgleish
Source: Journal of experimental psychology. General · DOI 10.1037/xge0000343 Published 2017-06-29 · Open source record
License: CC BY 3.0 deed

Text preparation and changes

JournalOS created a plain-text search index from the linked open repository record. Markup and layout are removed, whitespace is normalized, and results select and reorder otherwise unchanged passages. Open the canonical source to verify complete context.

Coverage: repository text extract. Verify context in the canonical source. Not clinical advice or emergency support.

Source context

Models of memory propose that separate systems underpin the storage and recollection of specific events from our past (e.g., the first day at school), and of the generic structure of our experiences (e.g., how lonely I am), and that interplay between these systems serves to optimize everyday cognition. Specifically, it is proposed that memories of discrete events help define the circumstances (boundary conditions) in which our generalized knowledge applies, thereby enhancing accuracy of memory-dependent cognitive processes. However, in the domain of self-judgment, cognition is systematically biased, with a robust self-enhancement bias characterizing healthy individuals and a negativity bias characterizing the clinically depressed. We hypothesized that self-enhancement effects in the mentally healthy may partly rest on an impaired ability for specific memories to set appropriate boundary conditions on positive self-generalizations, while the opposite may be true for self-referred negative traits in the depressed. To assess this, we asked healthy and depressed individuals to think about the applicability of a trait to themselves, then to recall a specific memory that was inconsistent with that trait which would therefore index a boundary condition for its applicability. Healthy individuals showed faster recall only for specific positive memories following negative trait evaluations, while depressed individuals demonstrated faster recall only of specific negative memories following positive trait evaluations—the pattern expected given the respective self-enhancement and negativity biases. Results suggest that specific memories may serve to delimit self-generalizations in biased ways, and thus support systemic biases in trait judgments characteristic of healthy and depressed individuals.

How this agent works

It searches a plain-text extract of the linked open repository record. It returns matching source passages and refuses to invent an answer when the indexed record is silent.

Original journal: Journal of experimental psychology. General
Published: 2017-06-29
DOI: 10.1037/xge0000343
Open record: PMC6600872

Read full article Open PDF Canonical source License deed

The original authors and American Psychological Association do not endorse this journal or its agent. Verify findings in the canonical article before making consequential decisions.