Autobiographical memory and cognitive flexibility serve important functions in emotion regulation and social functioning, and disruptions in these processes are associated with mental ill health. However, it is unclear how different aspects of memory retrieval and flexible thinking interact to impact the lives of people with mental health concerns. This thesis summarises the literature on depression, social anxiety, and flexible thinking. Then, it investigates four domains of flexibility in a cohort of 151 young people in the UK. Chapter 2 is a novel investigation of detail on an alternating instructions autobiographical memory test (AMT-AI). No deficit in autobiographical memory flexibility associated with mental health symptomatology was found; however, depressive symptoms were associated with decreased detail across memory types. In Chapter 3, a novel paradigm was developed to mirror the flexibility demands of the AMT-AI for non-autobiographical episodic memory. No difficulties associated with psychopathology were found. However, performance on the novel task was related to performance on the AMT. Chapter 4 investigates flexible emotional responsiveness. Mental health symptomatology was associated with a negative bias across conditions, but only state rumination was associated with a deficit in emotional flexibility. Chapter 5 investigates mental health symptoms and the previous flexibility domains in relation to pattern shifting, in order to assess the extent to which these items are measuring a shared concept of cognitive flexibility. Mental health symptoms were surprisingly predictive of better pattern shifting in this sample. Pattern shifting was not related to non-autobiographical memory, or to memory detail, but it was related to autobiographical memory accuracy and emotional flexibility. These studies suggest the relationship between mental health and different aspects of flexible thinking can be complex and context- and population-specific, and highlight the need to use caution when designing mental health interventions around perceived general cognitive deficits. This also has implications for the way that cognitive flexibility is conceptualised, as the findings suggest that flexibility in certain domains is not always correlated with flexibility in others, and that different domain-specific cognitive flexibility processes may be differentially related to mental health variables.
Rachel-Marie Weiss (Mon,) studied this question.