Depression versus anxiety: A test of the content-specificity hypothesis.

Abstract

Beck's cognitive model predicts that depressed and anxious individuals can be differentiated on the basis of their cognitions regarding their self, world, and future. The present experiment used a trait-rating and incidental recall paradigm to test this "content-specificity" hypothesis. Clinically depressed, anxious, and psychiatric control subjects were presented with depression-relevant and anxiety-relevant trait adjectives, and initially judged whether the adjectives were self-descriptive prior to a free-recall task. Depressed subjects judged and recalled more negative depression-relevant stimuli than did the anxious and control subjects, and they were the only group to judge and recall more negative than positive depression-relevant stimuli. The anxious subjects recalled more negative than positive anxiety-relevant adjectives. The depressed subjects, however, also showed evidence of biased processing for anxiety-relevant stimuli. The findings were interpreted as providing support for the content-specificity hypothesis for depression, and minimal support of the hypothesis for anxiety.

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