From basic science to clinical practice: Can cognitive behavioural therapy tasks be augmented with 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).