Psychometric properties of the written version of the autobiographical memory test in a japanese community sample
Introduction
Reduced specificity in autobiographical memory is recognized as a hallmark of depressive cognition, which has been intensively studied in clinical psychology and related fields (Williams et al., 2007). Since the seminal work of Williams and Broadbent (1986), it has been repeatedly shown that individuals with depression have difficulty retrieving specific events that they experienced in the past (Dalgleish and Werner-Seidler, 2014, Williams et al., 2007). This phenomenon is referred as reduced autobiographical memory specificity or overgeneral autobiographical memory, which is considered as a cognitive vulnerability factor that not only correlates with concurrent levels of depressive symptoms (van Vreeswijk and de Wilde, 2004), but also predicts future levels of depression after controlling for baseline levels (Brittlebank et al., 1993, Peeters et al., 2002, Raes et al., 2006; see Sumner et al., 2010, for a review).
Autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) is typically measured using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams and Broadbent, 1986). In the AMT, respondents are presented with several emotional cue words (e.g., happy, sad), and asked to recall and describe their personal memories of which those cue words remind them. Each response is scored by researchers on the basis of pre-established criteria (Williams and Broadbent, 1986), in which specific memories are operationally defined as memories referring to an event that occurred at a particular place and time, and lasted less than one day. Although the AMT cue words vary across studies, most studies use 10 cue words (including five negative and five positive adjectives) and count the number (or proportion) of “specific” responses as the primary index of AMS (Griffith et al., 2012a; van Vreeswijk and de Wilde, 2004).
The AMT has been administered in a wide range of samples (e.g., clinical and non-clinical populations, children, adolescents, and elderly; Griffith et al., 2012a, Griffith et al., 2012b); however, the evidence on reduced AMS has been gathered in Western societies. Only a handful of studies have investigated reduced AMS in Asian (particularly East Asian) populations (e.g., Dritschel et al., 2011; Kong, et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2016; Matsumoto and Mochizuki, 2016), and in most cases, these rare studies confirm the association between reduced AMS and depressive symptoms in Asian individuals. One possible factor preventing researchers from conducting AMS studies in Asia is that the psychometric properties are still unknown under the potential language and cultural differences between Western and Eastern societies, for example, in terms of self-construal and emotion knowledge (Markus and Kitayama, 1991, Wang, 2011). Because depression is estimated as one of the most serious social problems in Asian countries (e.g., Mathers and Loncar, 2006; Okumura and Higuchi, 2011), it is important to validate the AMT for facilitating cognitive research on depression in Asia, and for documenting and understanding similarities and/or differences in AMS across people with different (cultural) backgrounds.
Therefore, in the present study, we examined the psychometric properties of the AMT in a large Japanese community sample by (a) comparing mean levels of AMS between Japanese vs. Belgian and UK samples (Debeer et al., 2009, Heron et al., 2012); (b) examining the (uni-)factorial structure of AMS across positive and negative cue words (cf. Griffith et al., 2009; Griffith et al., 2012b); (c) testing correlations between AMS and depressive symptoms and related psychopathological variables (i.e., rumination, anxiety, and worry; de Decker, et al., 2003; Raes et al., 2006); and (d) examining the age dependency of AMS as some studies have shown a declining trend for AMS with increasing age (e.g., Brittlebank et al., 1993).
First, it has been shown that Asian (Chinese, Chinese-American, or Taiwanese) people tend to recall autobiographical memories with less specific details than American (e.g., Wang, 2001; Wang et al., 2011) and British individuals (Dritschel et al., 2011); however, another study shows no differences in memory specificity (measured by the sentence completion task; Raes et al., 2007) between Chinese and Australian participants (Chen et al., 2015). The reduced specificity in Asians is argued to be rooted to the unique parental education styles in East Asian cultures, which emphasize social roles rather than personal autonomy. In many East Asian cultures, such as China, Korea, and Japan, people believe that emotion needs to be strictly controlled because emotion is considered as destructive or even dangerous to ongoing relationships and social harmony; however, in Euro-American cultures, expressing emotion is encouraged, as it is an affirmation of individual uniqueness (Wang, 2011). These arguments suggest that Japanese people might generate less specific memories on the AMT than do European and American people, due to the tendency to suppress emotional expressions and emotional memories. This point is particularly important when it comes to the feasibility of the AMT in depression research, because such a general tendency to respond with less specific memories would limit the sensitivity of the AMT to discriminate between individuals with and without vulnerability for depression. Therefore, we compared AMS of a Japanese sample to that of European samples, using the same or a highly similar AMT procedure (Debeer et al., 2009, Heron et al., 2012).
Second, because the AMT often includes positively and negatively valenced cue words, some researchers have scored memory specificity separately for positive and negative items. However, a meta-analytic review suggests that the findings on the “valence effect” of the AMT are not consistent across studies (Van Vreeswijk and de Wilde, 2004); some studies found that patients with depression responded with less specific and more overgeneralized memories to positive than negative cue words (e.g., Park, Goodyer, and Teasdale, 2002), whereas other studies showed reduced specific memories for negative rather than positive cues (e.g., Mackinger et al., 2000). Griffith et al., 2009, Griffith et al., 2012b and Heron et al. (2012) examined the item response functions in the framework of the item response theory, suggesting that the AMT has a uni-factorial structure and does not have positive and negative latent factors. Therefore, they argued that there is no statistical support for calculating separate scores for negative and positive items, and that the valence effect would be more likely to reflect the idiosyncratic differences of the items rather than latent emotional factors. Following these findings, we tested the factor structure of the AMT. We examined whether the AMT has separate “positive” and “negative” factors or a single memory specificity factor.
Third, we examined the associations between AMS and depressive symptoms and related psychopathological variables. Although meta-analyses have shown that reduced AMS is associated with clinical levels of depression (Sumner et al., 2010; Van Vreeswijk and de Wilde, 2004), studies in non-clinical samples often failed to find a significant correlation between AMS and depressive symptoms (Raes et al., 2007). This is because the standard AMT, which explicitly asks respondents to describe a specific memory (i.e., an event that occurred on a specific day), is most sensitive to discriminate between people with low and extremely low levels of AMS (Griffith et al., 2009). Instead, for non-clinical analogue studies, researchers have proposed the minimal- or shortened-instruction variant of the AMT (Debeer et al., 2009, Heron et al., 2012). The minimal instructions do not explicitly instruct respondents that memories should be specific (Debeer et al., 2009); the shortened instructions provide respondents with examples of a specific and categoric memory, and ask them to describe real events, but do not state that the events should have occurred on a single day (Heron et al., 2012). Indeed, analyses of the item response theory suggest that these adapted versions of instructions are most informative for people falling at around the mean or moderate levels of AMS (Griffith et al., 2009, Heron et al., 2012). Furthermore, AMS measured by the minimal-instruction AMT was found to be correlated with depressive symptoms and rumination, in a non-clinical student sample (rs=−.20 and −.28, respectively; Debeer et al., 2009). Because such negative repetitive thinking—often referred to as rumination in depression and worry in anxiety (Ehring and Watkins, 2008, Watkins, 2008)—is a critical factor that acts to exacerbate negative emotions in interaction with reduced AMS (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008; Raes et al., 2006; Williams et al., 2007), we examined in the present study whether AMS, measured by the AMT with the shortened instructions of Heron et al. (2012), is associated with depressive symptoms, depressive rumination, and anxious worry.
Fourth, it also would be important to examine the age-dependency of AMS, as episodic memories are known to be particularly sensitive to the influence of age (e.g., Brickman and Stern, 2009; Nyberg et al., 1996). Previous studies have suggested that older adults tend to respond with less specific memories on the AMT (Phillips and Williams, 1997, Serrano et al., 2007). This is because of age-related cognitive decline such as in working memory, but not because of change (or increase) in depressive symptoms (Brittlebank et al., 1993, Holland et al., 2012, Phillips and Williams, 1997, Ros et al., 2010, Williams et al., 2007). Other gerontological studies have also shown that older adults with and without depression generate specific memories at equally low levels, and that AMS has no significant associations with the severity of either depressive symptoms or depressive rumination (Phillips and Williams, 1997, Ricarte et al., 2015; but see Ricarte et al., 2011). Thus, we hypothesized a significant interaction between age and depressive symptoms predicting AMS, such that depression-related differences in AMS would be smaller for older than for younger people.
Section snippets
Participants and procedures
Participants were community dwellers living in Japan (n=1,240; 620 males and 620 females)1 and were recruited by an online survey company (Macromill Inc., Tokyo, Japan) from their list of potential (more than 1 million) responders. The participants voluntarily participated in the online survey. After providing demographic information about gender, age, and occupation, the
Basic statistics of the AMT
Table 1 shows average proportions of the five response categories of the AMT. Our participants responded with less specific memories (28%) compared with previous studies using the minimal or shortened instructions of the AMT in a Belgian undergraduate sample (53% in Debeer et al., 2009) and UK child sample (37% in Heron et al., 2012). Instead, the proportion of semantic associates (27%) was higher than those found in European data (8% in Debeer et al., 2009; 3% in Heron et al., 2012), whereas
Discussion
The present study examined the psychometric properties of the AMT in a Japanese community sample. First, we found that the mean level of AMS was lower in the current Japanese sample as compared to previous Belgian and UK samples. We believe that this reduced AMS is not because of cultural differences, but can be mostly attributed to the age diversity in our dataset. As additional evidence, we found that (a) the youngest age group had comparable levels of AMS (around 40%) to the previous data
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
Keisuke Takano was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion Science Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research Abroad. Filip Raes was supported by the KU Leuven Research Council Grant PF/10/005.
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2017, Behaviour Research and TherapyCitation Excerpt :Moreover, we only used positive stimuli as targets to eliminate potential contamination by valence effects. Although we cannot completely exclude the possibility that the attention and/or working memory function varies across negative and positive materials, this seems quite unlikely given that AMS is not influenced by valence differences of the cue words (Griffith, Kleim, Sumner, & Ehlers, 2012; Griffith et al., 2009; Heron et al., 2012; Takano et al., 2017; for a review, see Griffith, Sumner, Raes, Barnhofer, Debeer, & Hermans, 2012). Taken together, our results indeed show that AMS is associated with inhibition of activation for cue-unassociated distracters, but it is still unclear whether AMS relies on selective activation for specific representations of individual event memories, and whether the inhibition is influenced by valence effect.