Self-Verifying Depression in Retrospect: More Depressed People Reconstruct the Past to Seem More Depressed

Introduction: Self-verification theory makes the controversial claim that people higher in depression seek to confirm their depressed identity. Recent evidence suggests that people with higher self-reported depression severity alter their reports of self-relevant information to seem depressed. This article discusses the results of two preregistered studies that examined whether people with higher self-reported depression severity will distort memories of previously encoded events to seem depressed. Methods: In Studies 1 and 2, participants (total N = 665) self-reported their depression severity and then completed a (sham) perceptual task that could presumably diagnose the possession of a brain type that causes depression symptoms. Results: Across the two studies, depression severity (apart from negative affectivity or gender) was related to how people distorted their memories on the task; specifically, people with relatively “high” depression severity distorted their recalls to seem as if they had the depression-prone brain, and people with relatively “low” depression severity showed the opposite bias. These effects did not involve conscious awareness of distortion and had downstream effects on people's self-concepts. Discussion: Broadly, the data align with the possibility that people relatively higher in depression are prone to exhibit biases in reconstructive memory that validate their depressive symptoms.