Unintentionally and repetitively remembering specific events is a hallmark feature of psychopathology, with theories claiming that they play a causal role in PTSD, depression, anxiety disorders, and more. However, emerging evidence suggests that intrusive memories are also exceedingly common in everyday life, even among individuals without any mental health disorders. If intrusive memories are not diagnostic of psychopathology, what is? Building upon core cognitive theories of memory, we know that the act of remembering is not necessarily the act of reliving. As such, the subjective experience (or phenomenology) of the memory may be key: complex, interrelated memory features such as vividness and emotional intensity may interact to produce adverse outcomes. My work leverages natural variance in these subjective experiences, both between memories and between individuals, to ask why intrusive memories develop and how they relate to one’s neurocognitive profile. Studying intrusive memories and their subjective experiences offers a rich testing ground for fundamental theories of autobiographical memory, while also providing important opportunities to improve clinical outcomes.
One line of my work has demonstrated large-scale, replicable evidence that subjective features of intrusive memories have real-world outcomes. For instance, negatively valenced intrusive memories are associated with greater symptoms of mental health disorders (e.g., PTSD, depression, social anxiety disorder; Yeung & Fernandes, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024; Yeung et al., 2024), even at the subclinical level. Other subjective features of intrusive memories such as vividness and frequency of recurring have shown utility in diverse domains, such as predicting trait mind wandering (Yeung & Fernandes, 2024) and differentiating between depression and boredom proneness (Yeung et al., 2024).
I have recently extended this work by showing that the vividness and emotional intensity of involuntary memories predict disorder symptoms, whereas voluntary memories with similar phenomenology could not (Yeung & Fernandes, 2026). Altogether, my work has shown that intrusive memories are a general cognitive phenomenon with unique relationships with psychopathology that we would otherwise miss using traditional laboratory or voluntary memory paradigms.
References
2026
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Voluntary and recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories: Similar phenomenology, different relationships with psychopathology
Ryan C Yeung and Myra A Fernandes
Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2026
Recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories (rIAMs) may be a transdiagnostic feature of psychopathology, since their phenomenology (subjective experience; e.g., negative valence, high vividness) could impact mental health. However, it remains unclear whether rIAM phenomenology is uniquely associated with psychopathology, or if these associations extend to voluntary AMs (VAMs). Here, we analyzed VAMs (n = 871) and rIAMs (n = 2,101) produced by undergraduates, contrasting univariate and multivariate approaches of relating AM phenomenology to psychopathology. Despite overall similarities across AM types, rIAM phenomenology (e.g., negative valence, high emotional intensity) distinguished between participants with versus without disorders, whereas VAMs could not, even if they had comparable phenomenology. Furthermore, rIAM phenomenology provided significantly better estimates of posttraumatic stress disorder and general anxiety symptoms than VAM phenomenology, suggesting some disorder-specificity. rIAMs have unique transdiagnostic relationships with psychopathology, to a greater extent than VAMs.
2024
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Recurrent involuntary memories and mind wandering are related but distinct
Ryan C Yeung and Myra A Fernandes
Psychological Research, 2024
Spontaneous thought is common in daily life, and includes recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs; memories retrieved unintentionally and repetitively) and mind wandering (MW). Both recurrent IAMs and MW are often unintentional or unconstrained, and both predict symptoms of mental health disorders. However, not all MW is unintentional, and not all IAMs are unconstrained. To what extent do recurrent IAMs and MW converge versus diverge? Undergraduates (N = 2,701) completed self-report measures of recurrent IAMs, trait MW, and psychopathology (i.e., PTSD, depression, anxiety). Regressions indicated that recurrent IAMs were significantly associated with spontaneous MW, but not deliberate MW. Further, both spontaneous MW and recurrent IAMs had unique relationships with disorder symptoms. Results suggest that recurrent IAMs are related to MW to the extent that recurrent IAMs are spontaneous. Conversely, recurrent IAMs are distinct from MW to the extent that recurrent IAMs’ associations with disorder symptoms could not be solely explained by trait MW (and vice versa). This work highlights related, but distinguishable, forms of spontaneous thought and their transdiagnostic links with psychopathology.
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Disentangling boredom from depression using the phenomenology and content of involuntary autobiographical memories
Ryan C Yeung, James Danckert, Wijnand AP Van Tilburg, and Myra A Fernandes
Scientific Reports, 2024
Recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are memories retrieved unintentionally and repetitively. We examined whether the phenomenology and content of recurrent IAMs could differentiate boredom and depression, both of which are characterized by affective dysregulation and spontaneous thought. Participants (n = 2484) described their most frequent IAM and rated its phenomenological properties (e.g., valence). Structural topic modeling, a method of unsupervised machine learning, identified coherent content within the described memories. Boredom proneness was positively correlated with depressive symptoms, and both boredom proneness and depressive symptoms were correlated with more negative recurrent IAMs. Boredom proneness predicted less vivid recurrent IAMs, whereas depressive symptoms predicted more vivid, negative, and emotionally intense ones. Memory content also diverged: topics such as relationship conflicts were positively predicted by depressive symptoms, but negatively predicted by boredom proneness. Phenomenology and content in recurrent IAMs can effectively disambiguate boredom proneness from depressive symptoms in a large sample of undergraduate students from a racially diverse university.