The aim of the present research was to examine implicit and explicit memory bias in depressed individuals based on the Transfer Appropriate Processing (TAP) framework. For this purpose, 60 participants (30 outpatient depressed participants for the experimental group and 30 non-depressed participants for the control group) were selected as research sample based on psychiatric interviews of DSM-IV. For examining implicit memory bias, words dots counting task (perceptual encoding), generation task (conceptual encoding) and lexical decision task at two levels of conceptual and perceptual processing were used. For examining explicit memory bias, free recall task was used. Participants were completing the tasks individually. Results showed that depressed participants in comparison with non-depressed participants show implicit and explicit memory bias toward negative words at the level of conceptual processing. At the level of perceptual processing at explicit memory, depressed participants in comparison with non-depressed participants in the control group remembered negative words better. In addition, non-depressed participants in the control group remembered neutral words better. Overall, these findings showed that employing Levels of perceptual and conceptual and the transfer appropriate processing (TAP) together in implicit memory bias of depressed participants would lead to a better understanding of implicit memory in these individuals.

Keywords: depression, memory, perceptual processing, conceptual processing, transfer appropriate processing

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