Autobiographical memory specificity in schizophrenia
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The specificity of autobiographical memories in schizophrenia under different memory cuing conditions.
IRAS ID
323173
Contact name
Reece Thomas
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Central Lancashire
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 5 days
Research summary
Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder characterised by symptoms of delusions (beliefs that are not based on reality, such as an individual believing the police are following them), hallucinations (hearing voices or sounds and seeing things that are not present) and disorganised thoughts. Patients with schizophrenia have cognitive difficulties that may cause problems in autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory (AM) is memory for episodes in one’s own past. It may affect the development of a sense of self, which in turn may be important in developing relationships, problem-solving and future thinking. A disturbed sense of self is common in schizophrenia, and this may be because patients with schizophrenia often have autobiographical memories that are overgeneral (i.e., do not contain specific detail). However, research that has shown overgeneral autobiographical memory in schizophrenia uses a variety of different ways of testing memory. For example, some research asks people to remember any event they are reminded of by certain words, like ‘happy’, whereas other research asks people to remember any event from certain periods in their life, like childhood. It may be that some methods are better for reminding people of specific episodes than others. The proposed study will see if this is the case. We will recruit a group of patients with schizophrenia and a group of participants from the general population. With everyone, we will use several different ways of measuring autobiographical memory and then compare how specific the memories are using the different methods. We can also compare how specific the memories are in the two different groups. The results will tell us how the methods that we use to measure autobiographical memory can affect how specific the memories are. The results will also tell us what method is best to use in future research with schizophrenia patients.
REC name
Wales REC 7
REC reference
23/WA/0194
Date of REC Opinion
15 Jun 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion