| This study examined the relationship between Autobiographical Memory Specificity (AMS) and three "avoidant" styles: repressive coping (Weinberger, Schwartz, & Davidson, 1979), dismissing attachment (Bartholomew, 1990; Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), and rejection sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996). Reduced AMS has been linked with depression, suicidality and trauma history, but is also an enduring, "trait-like" phenomenon (Williams, Segal, Teasdale, & Soulsby, 2000) that may constitute one aspect of a stable, dysfunctional cognitive style (see e.g., Drummond, Dritschel, Astell, O'Carroll, & Dalgleish, 2006). Characteristic styles of autobiographical memory performance are defining features of both repressive coping and dismissing attachment. Memory biases have been associated with repressive coping (e.g., Davis & Schwartz, 1987; Hansen & Hansen, 1988) and avoidant attachment (e.g., Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995), and have been demonstrated among rejection sensitive individuals (Mor & Inbar, 2009). It was hypothesized that reduced AMS would be associated with repressive coping and dismissing attachment, while increased AMS would be associated with rejection sensitivity. The Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT; Raes, Hermans, Williams, & Eelen, 2007), a measure developed to assess AMS in non-clinical populations, asks participants to provide continuations to sentence stems probing for past experiences. The SCEPT was completed by 198 college students, 144 female and 54 male, along with measures of repressive coping, attachment style, and rejection sensitivity. Independent samples T-tests revealed no difference in memory scores between repressive copers and the rest of the sample, and no significant correlation was found between AMS and rejection sensitivity. Contrary to expectations, dismissing individuals exhibited greater specificity than the rest of the sample, producing a higher proportion of specific responses and fewer categoric responses on the SCEPT than the rest of the sample. One possible explanation for this finding can be found in research linking executive control deficiencies with decreased AMS (Dalgleish et al., 2007). Dismissing individuals may possess sufficient executive functioning to perform well on both the cognitive tasks associated with executive control and on the memory task used in this study (Gillath, Giesbrect & Shaver, 2009). |
