• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.53-59
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• 2012

Objectives : Autobiographical memory (ABM) is a special type of episodic memory, containing events that have occurred in a personal life. Overgeneral tendency of ABM refers to the retrieval of memory with only general and categorical descriptions rather than specific events. ABM specificity in depression and posttraumatic stress disorder is a robust finding with relation to cognitive vulnerability, affect regulation, problem-solving ability. It is also implicated in bipolar disorder with frequent relapses. In this study, we investigated whether ABM specificity was related to manic or euthymic mood states in patients with bipolar disorder. Methods : Forty bipolar patients with manic and euthymic episodes and 25 healthy controls participated in this study. Prompted by 5 positively and 5 negatively valenced emotional cue words, each participant was instructed to recall positive or negative memories and describe them in detail. The One-way ANOVA was used to compare ABM scores and post-hoc analyses were done. Results : Comapred to the healthy persons, the bipolar patients reported significantly more general than specific negative memories in both manic and euthymic episodes (p = 0.003). However, there was no significant difference between manic and euthymic patients (p = 0.074). Conclusions : These results suggest that overgeneral tendency of negative ABM may be a trait abnormality in bipolar disorder. Moreover, this phenomenon might be related to underlying cognitive deficits or affect regulation irrespective of the mood state.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.579-587
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Korean learners perceive English vowels and further to test SLM which claims that new L2 vowel categories are more easily acquired than similar L2 vowel categories. Twenty Korean learners participated in English-to-Korean mapping test and English vowel identification test with target vowels /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, ɛ, æ/. The result revealed that Korean participants mapped the English pairs /i/-/ɪ/ and /u/-/ʊ/ onto single Korean vowel /i/ and /u/, respectively. in addition, both of English /ɛ/ and /æ/ were simultaneously mapped onto Korean /e/ and /ɛ/. This indicated that the Korean participants seemed to have perceptual difficulty for the pairs /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/, and /ɛ-æ/. The result of the forced-choice identification test showed that the accuracy of /ɪ, ʊ, æ/(ɪ: 81.3%, ʊ: 62.5%, æ: 60.0%) was significantly higher than that of /i, u, ɛ/(i: 28,8%, u: 28.8%, ɛ: 32.4%). Thus, the claim of SLM is confirmed given that /ɪ, ʊ, æ/ are new vowel categories whereas /i, u, ɛ/ are similar vowel categories. Further, the conspicuously low accuracy of the similar L2 vowel categories /i, u, ɛ/ was accounted for by over-generalization whereby the Korean participants excessively replaced L2 similar /i, u, ɛ/ with L2 new /ɪ, ʊ, æ/ as the participants were learning the L2 new vowel categories in the process of acquisition. Based on the findings this study, pedagogical suggestions are provided.