[Autobiographical Event and Perspective Experience]

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INTRODUCTION

Depression is one of the most commonly occurring disorders among all the major psychiatric disorders, (Hofmann et al. 2011). Improvement of human psychological wellbeing is possible by understanding the factors that result in psychiatric disorders (David et al, 2010). Therefore, development of psychobiological model and formulation for depression as one of the most common psychiatric disorders are important. One question that needs to be asked is what the causes of depression are; in fact, many risk factors such as biological, interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional factors need to be evaluated to provide clues to the etiology of depression (Hankin, 2006). Several studies have reported that psychological treatment of depression is associated with improvement in measures of cognitive dysfunction (Hofmann et al. 2011). In addition, cognitive theories of depression are concerned primarily with the human mental activities such as memory; these concern the autobiographical memory (Anderson et al. 2000). Moreover, other important domain of cognitive functioning is future thinking (Atance, 2008). Limited research has compared remembering the past and imagining the future (Anderson and Dewhurst, 2012); whatever studies are available, they suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future have a number of similarities in common(Anderson and Dewhurst, 2012). On the other hand, research has also reported number of differences at the same time (Addis et al. 2007). In addition, shared deficits in remembering the past and imagining the future have been observed in clinical populations (Brown et al. 2012). There are indications of possible links that exists between vantage perspective for recalling the autobiographical memory and imagining future (Loretxu et al. 2008), but to the best of our knowledge, the link between vantage perspective in imagining the future and recalling the past has not been studied in depth in people with different levels of depression. In fact, it can be the first study of its kind to investigate the relationship between different levels of depression as well as the manner in which individual's process information and utilize their cognitive skills (vantage perspective for recalling past and, visual imagery for future events).

Past Autobiographical Event

Over the past fifteen years, a large body of research has been focused on the different aspects of autobiographical memory (Semkovska et al. 2012). Autobiographical memory (AM) is a reconstructive process of one's past. It links sensory perceptual episodic memory with its context. Retrieval of personal memories comprises dynamic processes that results in continues construction and reconstruction of AM among people with evidence of depression. AM specificity is also impaired, for instance, among people who suffer from depression, specific experiences are encoded within a general theme (Goddard et al. 1996). Most of studies conducted in the field of AM within the context of depression relate to retrieval of specific events; event specificity was the only element of AM which is assessed in most of the research (Bergouignan et al. 2008). These studies suggested that there is a general autobiographical memory phenomenon in people who suffer from depression (Goddard et ...