From basic science to clinical practice: Do Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tasks benefit from enhanced episodic specificity?

Individuals with depression typically remember their past in a generalised manner, at the cost of retrieving specific event memories. This may impair engagement with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tasks that use concrete episodic information to challenge maladaptive beliefs, potentially limiting their therapeutic benefit. Study 1 demonstrated that an episodic specificity induction increased detail and specificity of autobiographical memory in people with major depression, relative to control conditions (N=88). We therefore examined whether the induction enhanced the efficacy of CBT tasks that depend on episodic memory – cognitive reappraisal (Study 2, N=30), evidence gathering (Study 2, N=30), and planning behavioural experiments (Study 3, N=30). Across all three tasks, there were no significant differences in emotion- or belief-change between the specificity and control conditions. Although the induction temporarily enhanced specificity in depressed individuals, it did not significantly boost the efficacy of CBT tasks theorised to benefit from the use of specific mnemonic information.