Information processing referred to self and others: depressive level and dysfunctional attitudes in a sample of university students

Abstract

The present work tries to clarify the relationship between mood and information processing when itis referred to oneself and to others. With this purpose, information processing has been studied in a sample of university students, using an incidental memory task after hearing two sequences of counterbalanced adjectives. The bias in the information processing has also been studied in relation to a vulnerability measurement, Results only confirm part of the findings in the corresponding literature. All the subjects (depressed and non-depressed) centered on the self-referentinformation that didnt describe them, whereas depressed subjects centered on the negative self- referent information, whereas non-depressed or control subjects centered on the positive self-referent information. The relationship between the vulnerability or dysfuntional attitude measures and the levels of depression showed the expected differences when the achievement and autonomy factors were considered, but not when the measure was considered globally.