Neural correlates of autobiographical memory deficits across psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis

• Psychiatric patients show common neural deficits in autobiographical memory (AM). • Meta-analyses found hyperactivation in anterior cingulate cortex in patients during AM. • Cingulate co-activation broadly connects with functional networks related to AM. Dysfunction of autobiographical memory (AM) is one of the core markers of psychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder and schizophrenia. However, it remains unclear whether there is a common neural basis underlying AM impairment across psychiatric patients. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis using both Seed-based d Mapping with Permutation of Subject Images (SDM-PSI) and Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) approaches were conducted to examine brain activation differences between psychiatric populations and healthy controls during AM. A computerized search was performed using the databases Web of Science, PubMed, APA PsycInfo and EBSCO to identify relevant studies published from inception to 31 October 2025. Twenty-four studies (1385 participants) were identified for the qualitative synthesis and 12 studies (547 participants) for the meta-analysis. The qualitative analysis revealed widespread abnormalities in psychiatric patients in both activation and functional connectivity (FC) across default mode network, salience and attentional network, control network and visual network. Meta-analysis results indicated that patients with psychiatric disorders exhibited hyperactivations in the cingulate cortex, and subsequent meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) analysis demonstrated its widespread co-activation with large-scale functional networks. These findings suggest the network-level dysfunction across psychiatric disorders during AM process and provide insights for future clinical research.