Effects of genetic information on memory for severity of depressive symptoms

The general public is increasingly aware of the role of genes in causing depression. Recent studies have begun uncovering unintended negative consequences of learning about a person’s genetic susceptibility to disorders. Because people tend to believe that genes determine one’s identity, having genes related to a disorder can be misinterpreted as equivalent to having the disorder. Consequently, learning that a person is genetically predisposed to depression can make people misremember mild depression as more severe. Participants across three experiments read a target vignette about a character displaying mild depressive symptoms, while descriptions of the character’s genetic susceptibility to depression were experimentally manipulated. Participants then read a foil vignette describing a character with more severe depressive symptoms. Afterwards, participants who had learned that the target character was genetically predisposed to depression were comparatively more likely to misremember the target symptoms as being severe, when in fact they were mild. This pattern of results was obtained among both laypeople (Experiments 1 and 2) and practicing master’s-level, but not doctoral-level, mental health clinicians (Experiment 3). Given that depression is diagnosed primarily based on a person’s memory of depressive symptoms, the current findings suggest that genetic information about depression may lead to over-diagnosis of depression.