Recalling happy memories during adolescence can reduce risk of depression

Recalling positive events and experiences can help protect young people against depression in later life.

Happiness. Image credit: Yann Forget/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting more than 300 million people. The condition often first emerges in adolescence, a critical developmental time period when an individual experiences substantial changes in their brain structure and chemistry.

A known risk factor of depression is exposure to early life stress, such as illness, parents’ separation or death, or adverse family circumstances.

Mental health disorders that first occur in adolescence are more severe and more likely to recur in later life.

People often engage in reminiscing about past events during their everyday lives, sometimes as a strategy for lifting their mood when they feel sad. A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and University College London set out to examine whether remembering positive experiences could prove an important way of protecting ourselves against stress when it occurs in adolescence.

They examined the effect of recalling positive memories on two signs of vulnerability to depression: negative self-related thoughts and high morning levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

The team found that recalling specific positive memories was associated with fewer negative self-related thoughts and with lower levels of cortisol 12 months later. In other words, remembering more specific positive events reduced their vulnerability to depression over the course of one year.

Further investigation showed that recalling positive events only reduced negative self-related thoughts and depressive symptoms in response to stressful life events, but not if the adolescents had experienced no stressful life events.

This work suggests that ‘remembering the good times’ may help build resilience to stress and reduce vulnerability to depression in young people. (University of Cambridge)

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