Semantic similarity among autobiographical memories is associated with rumination

IF 2.2 4区医学 Q3 PSYCHIATRY

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry Pub Date : 2025-10-09 DOI:10.1016/j.jbtep.2025.102072

Noboru Matsumoto , Yudai Iijima , Mingming Lin , Yuki Nishiguchi , Keisuke Takano , Filip Raes

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Depressive rumination is characterized by repetitive dwelling on one or more self-relevant, past-oriented topics. However, little empirical evidence links depressive rumination to the perseveration of specific themes in autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval. This study examined whether ruminators are more likely to retrieve semantically overlapping AMs across different times and locations using the experience sampling method (ESM). Participants (N = 58 Japanese-speaking university students) generated AMs in response to negative and positive cues three times daily for seven days. In total, 3063 AMs were collected and analyzed. For each participant, we computed cosine similarity to quantify semantic overlap among the reported AMs. The results indicated that individuals with higher levels of rumination exhibited greater semantic overlap among negative AMs (r = 0.33), suggesting that ruminators’ AMs tended to revolve around similar topics and themes across different cues and assessment occasions. These findings suggest that semantic overlap serves as an underlying mechanism of depressive rumination (and vice versa), wherein different cues activate a specific network that encodes similar or identical negative memory representations.

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自传体记忆的语义相似性与反刍有关

抑郁症的特点是反复思考一个或多个与自己相关的、以过去为导向的话题。然而，很少有经验证据将抑郁反刍与自传体记忆（AM）检索中特定主题的持久性联系起来。本研究采用经验抽样法（ESM）考察了反刍者是否更有可能在不同时间和地点检索到语义重叠的记忆。参与者（N = 58名说日语的大学生）在7天内每天三次对消极和积极的暗示做出反应。共收集和分析了3063个AMs。对于每个参与者，我们计算余弦相似度来量化报告的AMs之间的语义重叠。结果表明，反刍水平越高的个体在消极记忆中表现出更大的语义重叠（r = 0.33），这表明反刍者在不同线索和评估场合中倾向于围绕相似的主题和主题进行反刍。这些发现表明，语义重叠是抑郁反刍的潜在机制（反之亦然），其中不同的线索激活了一个特定的网络，该网络编码相似或相同的负面记忆表征。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry Multiple-

CiteScore

3.60

自引率

5.60%

发文量

期刊介绍： The publication of the book Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (1958) by the co-founding editor of this Journal, Joseph Wolpe, marked a major change in the understanding and treatment of mental disorders. The book used principles from empirical behavioral science to explain psychopathological phenomena and the resulting explanations were critically tested and used to derive effective treatments. The second half of the 20th century saw this rigorous scientific approach come to fruition. Experimental approaches to psychopathology, in particular those used to test conditioning theories and cognitive theories, have steadily expanded, and experimental analysis of processes characterising and maintaining mental disorders have become an established research area.