A central tenet of a self-schema model for depression is the idea that severity of depression is a crucial determinant of the content and cohesiveness of the depressive's self-schema. Consistent with predictions generated form this model, sample nondepressives displayed superior recall for self-referenced, nondepressed-content adjectives. Recall…

Depressed individuals seem to believe that they are qualitatively inferior; they tend to misinterpret and exaggerate losses and overgeneralize the meaning of self-relevant information. The way in which information about the self is processed by depressed individuals, in particular, the differences in self-schema content (the constellation of…