Depression and evaluative schemata

The evaluative tendencies of nondepressed, mildly depressed, and severely depressed individuals are examined in the areas of judgments of contingency, attributions of causality, expectancy estimates, and self-schemata/self-reference. The available empirical literature in these four areas indicates that nondepressed people tend to exhibit positivistic evaluative responses, whereas mildly depressed persons tend to display unbiased (neither positivistic nor negativistic) evaluative response patterns. The available evidence is suggestive of negativistic evaluative tendencies in severely depressed individuals, with this bias being most clearly manifested in the area of self-schemata/self-reference. These results are interpreted in terms of contemporary explanations of depression and recent advances in models of cognitive processing.