Acceptance and Change as Dialectic of Recovery: Examples of Storytelling, Fairy Tale and Psychopharmacotherapy as Therapeutic Modalities.

"Narative medicine" promotes theraputic healing and recovery using fairy tales and traditional folk stories. Individuals are capable of shaping their lives through various narrative strategies and re-authoring alternative stories that are concerned with different aspects of acceptance and change. Psychotherapy through the eyes of stories and fairy tales can have two perspectives.

The Impact of Affective Context on Autobiographical Recollection in Depression.

Across two studies we investigated the influence of contextual cues on autobiographical memory recall. In Study 1, participants ( = 37) with major depressive disorder, in episode or in varying degrees of remission, were administered a Negative Autobiographical Memory Task (NAMT) that required them to retrieve valenced memories in response to cue words (a positive context). We reasoned that increased depression symptom severity would be associated with a reduced ability to override priming from this disadvantageous context.

Facets of pejorative self-processing in complicated grief.

Objective: Complicated grief (CG) has been proposed as a psychiatric response to bereavement distinct from established mood and anxiety disorder diagnoses. Little is known about the nature of cognitive-affective processing in CG, nor any similarities or differences compared with the processing profiles associated with other emotional disorders. Three studies therefore investigated 3 broad facets of negative self-processing associated with either elevated symptoms of, or diagnosis of, CG--namely, self-related attributions or blame, self-devaluation, and cognitions about the future self.

The structure of past and future lives in depression.

This study assessed the organization of past autobiographical knowledge in individuals with either current major depressive disorder (MDD), MDD in remission, or no history of MDD (the control group). Participants generated personal lists of "life chapters," dividing both their past and potential future into subjectively meaningful episodes or themes (e.g.

Is prolonged grief distinct from bereavement-related posttraumatic stress?

Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) (previously called complicated grief (CG)) is proposed as a distinct post loss syndrome, with its own core symptoms. A key issue concerning the diagnostic validity of PGD is whether it can reliably be distinguished from related psychiatric outcomes following bereavement. This study therefore sought to determine whether the core symptoms of PGD could be distinguished from those of bereavement-related anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Reduced specificity of emotional autobiographical memories following self-regulation depletion.

The present study used a Color Stroop task, involving naming the ink colors of incongruous color words, to deplete self-regulation resources prior to retrieving a series of autobiographical memories to emotional and neutral cue words--the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT). Control participants either read color words written in black ink or performed no task prior to the AMT. Difficulty accessing specific memories on the AMT has been shown to index key aspects of the onset and maintenance of depression and other emotional disorders.

Reduced specificity of autobiographical memory and depression: the role of executive control.

It has been widely established that depressed mood states and clinical depression, as well as a range of other psychiatric disorders, are associated with a relative difficulty in accessing specific autobiographical information in response to emotion-related cue words on an Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; J. M. G.