Autobiographical Memory Impairments as a Transdiagnostic Feature of Mental Illness: A Meta-Analytic Review of Investigations Into Autobiographical Memory Specificity and Overgenerality Among People With Psychiatric Diagnoses

Decades of research has examined the difficulty that people with psychiatric diagnoses have in recalling specific autobiographical memories of events that lasted less than a day. Instead, they seem to retrievegeneral events that have occurred many times or which occurred over longer periods of time, termedovergeneral memory. We present the first transdiagnostic meta-analysis of memory specificity/overgeneralityand the first meta-regression of proposed causal mechanisms. A keyword search of Embase,PsycARTICLES, and PsycINFO databases yielded 74 studies that compared people with and withoutpsychiatric diagnoses on the retrieval of specific (k = 85) or general memories (k = 56). The majority ofstudies included participants with Major Depressive Disorder (∼49%), Schizophrenia (∼19%), andPosttraumatic Stress Disorder (∼17%) with few studies involving other groups of participants, for example,Anxiety Disorders (∼5%). Multilevel meta-analysis confirmed that people with psychiatric diagnosestypically recall fewer specific, g = −0.864, 95% CI [−1.030, −0.698], and more general, g = 712,95% CI [0.524, 0.900], memories than diagnoses-free people. The size of these effects did not differbetween diagnostic groups. There were no consistent moderators of effect size heterogeneity; effect sizeswere not explained by methodological factors such as cue valence or demographic variables such asparticipants’ age or between-group differences in process variables (e.g., rumination). Deficits in autobiographicalmemory retrieval may be a transdiagnostic factor, but further research in underrepresenteddiagnostic groups, and with novel experimental manipulations of encoding and retrieval processes, iswarranted before full transdiagnosticity and the processes underlying reduced specificity/overgeneralitycan be established