Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine whether people who were mildly depressed and those who were not differed in terms of their self-referent processing of personal information. Twenty undergraduate females, 10 mildly depressed and 10 normal participants, joined in this experiment. First, each participants made a story about an ambiguous situation, in which the heroine of this story was just like herself. They then performed a self-referent judgment on negative personality adjectives. After the task, they were given five minutes for an incidental free recall test. Main results are as follows: The mildly depressed judged that negative adjectives more accurately referred to themselves, and they also recalled more adjectives. These findings suggest that mildly depressed participants were more induced into a negative mood by making a story, were more self-focuse, d and recalled more adjectives with mood congruency effects.
