Determining optimal parameters of the self-referent encoding task: A large-scale examination of self-referent cognition and depression

• Main Authors: Beevers, C.G (Author), Dainer-Best, J. (Author), Lee, H.Y (Author), Shumake, J.D (Author), Yeager, D.S (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Psychological Association Inc. 2018
• Subjects: adolescent; Adolescent; adult; Adult; article; Behavioral tasks; Best subsets regression; college student; depression; Depression; Depressive Disorder; female; Female; field study; human; human experiment; human tissue; Humans; major clinical study; male; Male; middle aged; Middle Aged; pathophysiology; procedures; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; psychological rating scale; Psychometrics; psychometry; reaction time; recall; reproducibility; Reproducibility of Results; self concept; Self Concept; Self-reference; Self-schema; standards; stimulus; test retest reliability; validation process; young adult; Young Adult
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Although the self-referent encoding task (SRET) is commonly used to measure self-referent cognition in depression, many different SRET metrics can be obtained. The current study used best subsets regression with cross-validation and independent test samples to identify the SRET metrics most reliably associated with depression symptoms in three large samples: A college student sample (n = 572), a sample of adults from Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 293), and an adolescent sample from a school field study (n = 408). Across all 3 samples, SRET metrics associated most strongly with depression severity included number of words endorsed as self-descriptive and rate of accumulation of information required to decide whether adjectives were self-descriptive (i.e., drift rate). These metrics had strong intratask and split-half reliability and high test-retest reliability across a 1-week period. Recall of SRET stimuli and traditional reaction time (RT) metrics were not robustly associated with depression severity. © 2018 American Psychological Association.