Memory Bias in Panic Disorder

We investigated selective memory effects in patients with panic disorder. Thirty patients with panic disorder and 20 normal controls learned panic-related, strongly pleasant, and strongly unpleasant words. During the incidental learning task, Ss imagined scenes combining the referent of a presented word with themselves. After a distractor task, Ss took a free-recall test. Panic Ss showed enhanced memory for panic-related words but not for positive or negative words. In recent years, cognitive processes have received increasing attention in the exploration of emotional disorders. Special emphasis has been given to cognitive biases exhibited by patients suffering from a variety of emotional disorders, including panic disorder (PD), which is the focus of this article In anxiety disorders, cognitive biases have been investigated empirically with respect to judgment, attention, and memory. From their review of the available studies, In a recent review, Eysenck (1992, p. 159) indeed concluded that PD patients, unlike GAD patients, do show a memory bias for threatening, panic-related stimuli in free-recall tests. This conclusion was based on two empirical studies This research was supported by Grant Ma 1116/1-1 to 1-5 by the German Research Foundation to Jiirgen Margraf. We sincerely thank Walton T. Roth, Henry L. Roediger III, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We are also grateful to Peter Breuer, Marianne Gobel, Stefanie Klausmeier, Barbara Nesemann, Hans Schleichert, and Silvia Schneider for their help in programming the experimental software, recruiting and diagnosing the patients, and running experimental sessions. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eni Becker, Technical University Dresden, Department of Clinical Psychology, 01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet tobecker@psychologie.tu-dresden.d400.de. 1 Because of experimenter error, there was no appropriate measure of baseline completion rates in the word completion task. Therefore, the results of this implicit test could not be interpreted and are not reported here. However, administration of the word completion task did not impair interpretation of the following free-recall test. Both memory tests were stochastically independent: The probability of recalling a word in the free-recall test did not depend on whether the word was produced earlier in the word completion task (0 = .14, ns). Moreover, we also analyzed the free-recall data of only those words that were not produced in the word completion task (965 of the original 1,500). These data parallel those for the complete set of words: Patients with panic disorder recalled significantly more panic-related words than did normal controls, whereas the two groups did not differ on the recall of positively and negatively toned words. 39