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ALASTAIR DOBBIN ET AL.
actions . . . yet when faced with difficult, novel, or complex situations,
people often move toward more concrete levels of processing . . . there
are exceptions, including the tendency toward depressive rumination
in response to sad mood” (Watkins, 2008, p. 193): essentially Watkins is
saying that in some people the shift just fails to occur. Deficits in this
adaptive shift account for attributional style changes; you are more likely
to attribute negative outcomes to personal failings with an abstract self-
evaluative-thinking style.
Overgeneral memory (OGM) is a tendency to recall categories of
events (“when my father got angry he always shouted at us”) rather
than specific episodes (“one time my father shouted at me and my aunt
took me to the zoo and I fed the penguins”). It can be measured by the
Autobiographical Memory test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) and
the Sentence Completion Test (SCEPT; Raes, Watkins, Williams, &
Hermans, 2007), and a low score is identified with a vulnerability to
depression in cross-sectional (Brittlebank, Scott, Williams, & Ferrier,
1993; Williams, 1992; Williams & Dritischel, 1988) and longitudinal stud-
ies (Gibbs & Rude, 2004; for a review see Williams et al., 2007). Hermans
et al. (2008) found that OGM was associated with a higher probability of
still being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder in the near
future, outperforming other relevant indices, such as depression sever-
ity, rumination, level of self-esteem, and dysfunctional attitudes. OGM
can be specifically reduced by decentered thinking (Watkins & Teasdale,
2004) even when it is induced implicitly (Watkins, Teasdale, &Williams,
2000). This has led to a new avenue of therapy where the rehearsal of
specific memory leads to the reduction of depression (Raes et al., 2007);
although in hypnosis such a rehearsal of specific memory recall is com-
monly practiced in regression (Heap, Aravind, Hartland, & Waxman,
2002, pp. 229–231) when reexperiencing of revivified memory (observ-
ing how events unfold not why they happen) allows a reinterpretation
of past events in a nonjudgmental, nonself-evaluative manner.
Positive reappraisal is a “cognitive-linguistic strategy that alters the
trajectory of emotional responses by reformulating the meaning of a
situation” and involves “early selection and implementation of a cog-
nitive strategy that diminishes emotion without the need for sustained
effort over time” (Goldin, McRae, Ramel, & Gross, 2007, p. 577). It has
been shown to be the most effective way of reducing the autonomic
load in emotional distress (Gross, 2002). Reappraisal is endemic in our
everyday interactions with others and often crops up in conversation
(e.g., “a crisis is an opportunity,” “a failure is a learning opportu-
nity”). Over the long term, frequent use of reappraisal leads to
enhanced control of emotion, interpersonal functioning, and psycho-
logical and physical well-being, while the opposite strategy of emo-
tional control—suppression—results in diminished control of emotion,
interpersonal functioning, memory, well-being, and greater depressive
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