Depression: patients with depression often have memory problems that affect them in various ways. One way is through negative recall bias, this is when they are more likely to recall unhappy events than happy events. This is known as mood congruent memory. Another explanation for poor memory is that they have physical abnormalities in their brains. These could be related to biochemical activity for brain structure damage.
A second link between depression and poor memory is that depression may lead people to be inattentive and fail to encode passing events in LTM. In this case it isn’t so much that the depressed person has forgotten but that the memory was never stored in the first place. An evaluation point of depression is research by Bower, he hypnotised P’s and then told them they were in a happy or sad mood. He found that the p’s tended to recall more of the words accurately if they recalled them in the same mood they had learned them. P’s who learned the list in a sad mood recalled them better in that mood. The finding obtained in this study supports the mood congruent memory. However this study lacks ecological validity as well as mundane realism. It could also be said that the level of depression in the patient would affect the findings of the study.
Clinical depression patients who often have memory problems can be related to this study. They had trouble remembering memories about themselves and recall more negative memories than positive ones.. this may be because they may have gone through more negative memories than positive so they feel the need to dwell of the negative thoughts. Cognitive therapy attempts to get P’s to have more balanced view rather than a negative one and helps them see the positives as well as the negatives.
Part of cognitive therapy attempts to get P’s to recall less depressing memories and more positive memories. Although research on repression and depression suggests that emotion leads to memory loss the evidence of FBM’s suggests the opposite. Within all the three explanations there is both supporting and refuting evidence so it might be best to take an eclectic view of how emotion and memory are connected.