Solving problems by analogy: The benefits and detriments of hints and depressed moods

In Experiment 1, mildly depressed (dysphoric) and nondysphoric subjects tried to solve logic problems that were analogous to subsequent target problems; then they attempted target solutions with or without hints in the form of the anologues’ themes. Target solutions were impaired by the hints in the nondysphoric group alone. Experiment 2A was a no-training control to verify that transfer did indeed occur. In Experiment 2B, all subjects received hints in the transfer phase; the training phase was either problem oriented (as in Experiment 1) or memory oriented. Again, nondysphoric subjects solved fewer problems following problem-oriented training than did both dysphoric subjects in that condition and nondysphoric subjects with memory-oriented training. Experiment 3 replicated the previous results in the nondysphoric samples. We interpret these findings within the transferappropriate processing framework.     

Does depression interfere with effort mobilization? Effects of dysphoria and task difficulty on cardiovascular response

On the basis of predictions of the mood-behavior model (G. H. E. Gendolla, 2000) and motivational intensity theory (J. W. Brehm & E. A. Self, 1989), the authors conducted 2 studies that critically tested the common assumption that dysphoria is associated with a motivational deficit. Dysphoric and nondysphoric undergraduates performed a cognitive task that was either easy or difficult. Effort intensity (i.e., resource mobilization) was assessed as performance-related cardiovascular reactivity. In support of the authors' predictions and in contrast to the popular view of a general motivational deficit, both studies found a crossover interaction between dysphoria and task difficulty: In the difficult condition, nondysphoric participants indeed showed stronger systolic blood pressure reactivity than dysphoric participants. But in the easy condition, dysphoric participants showed stronger systolic reactivity than nondysphoric participants. The findings are discussed with respect to motivational deficits in depression and possible underlying mechanisms.     

Peer interactions of dysphoric adolescents

The present study sought to extend our knowledge of dysphoric adolescents' dyadic peer interactions. Thirty female dyads (ages 13–17) were videotaped interacting during both a structured and an unstructured task. Fourteen of the dyads were each comprised of a dysphoric girl and a nondysphoric girl; the remaining dyads were comprised of two nondysphoric girls. Girls were considered dysphoric if they scored 10 or higher on the Beck Depression Inventory. Dysphoric subjects evaluated their performances more negatively than nondysphoric subjects and rated their partners more negatively overall. The partners of the dysphoric girls were viewed by raters as less positive and less happy. They saw the dysphoric teens as making more critical comments and evaluated them more negatively overall. There was also a tendency for these girls to reject their dysphoric partners and to become more passive during the unstructured task. The findings indicate that dysphoric adolescent girls evoke negative reactions from peers and negatively influence their peers' behavior. These negative reactions from others may lead to further difficulties in negotiating the developmental tasks of adolescence.     

Moderately dysphoric mothers behave more positively with their infants after completing the BDI

To determine whether mildly and moderately dysphoric adolescent mothers display infantized facial and vocal behaviors, 21 nondysphoric mothers and 32 dysphoric (16 mildly and 16 moderately/severely dysphoric) mothers were videotaped during face-to-face interactions with their 4-month-old infants. Mildly dysphoric mothers showed less positive facial expressions and less animated/exaggerated vocal expressions. The moderately/severely dysphoric mothers, however, did not differ from nondysphoric mothers in their display of facial and vocal behaviors. These mothers with higher Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores may have become concerned about their many symptoms affecting their interactions and tried to compensate for this during their interactions. A second study was conducted to determine whether completing the BDI before interactions positively affected the moderately/severely dysphoric mothers' behavior. Moderately/severely dysphoric mothers (N=24) and mildly dysphoric mothers (N=24) were given the Beck Depression Inventory either before or after their face-to-face interactions with their 4-month-old infants. Moderately/severely dysphoric mothers who were given the BDI before their interactions showed more positive behavior than mothers given the BDI after their interactions. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

The influence of husband and wife personality on marital social support interactions

The influence of extraversion and negative affectivity on support interactions among married couples was examined. One hundred married couples were observed in two 10-minute interactions that were designed to elicit supportive behaviors. Extraverted support providers gave more support to their spouse than did introverts. Reciprocity in the exchange of support behaviors was also observed: The amount of support given by the individual in the first interaction predicted the amount of support provided to him or her during the second interaction. Negative affectivity was negatively correlated with ratings of interaction supportiveness, even when controlling for the number of supportive and negative behaviors received from the spouse. Extraverts showed higher sensitivity to emotional support behaviors than did introverts. The same level of emotional support behaviors from the spouse led to higher ratings of interaction supportiveness among those high on extraversion than among those low on extraversion. Results highlight the importance of integrative models of support that consider characteristics of the individual and his or her social environment.     

Stimulus Exposure Duration in a Deployment-of-Attention Task: Effects on Dysphoric,Recently Dysphoric,and Nondysphoric Individuals

Examined attentional deployment of dysphoric, unstable, and stable nondysphoric individuals using the Deployment-of-Attention Task (DOAT) while randomly varying stimulus exposure durations. Previous research indicates a nondepressed “protective” bias in attention whereas depressed individuals evidence no bias. The current study examined the possibility that depressed participants' lack of bias may actually reflect inattention to briefly presented stimuli, possibly due to slowed processing seen in depression (i.e. psychomotor retardation). Participants completed the DOAT, viewing stimuli at four presentation durations randomised across trials. Results indicated that dysphoric participants displayed no attentional bias even at extended presentation durations, whereas nondysphoric participants showed a “protective” bias. Within the nondysphoric group, unstable nondysphoric participants displayed a more pronounced protective bias than did stable nondysphorics.     

Maternal depressed mood and stress as related to vigilance,self-efficacy and mother-child interactions

Parenting self-efficacy, maternal vigilance, competence and child behaviour were studied in a community sample of mothers of 18-36-month-old children. Thirty dysphoric mothers had elevated Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores (12–16) and 30 nondysphoric mothers had BDIs <5. Dysphoric mothers were more stressed, less happily married, less effective as parents and described their children as less competent and responsive than did non-dysphoric mothers. When completing a distracting questionnaire task, all mothers were less vigilant and their children less well behaved than during free play. Stressed, dysphoric mothers were observed to be less sensitive, responsive, warm, vigilant and effective in controlling their children, and their children were more destructive, and less happy, responsive and compliant. Combined maternal stress and dysphoria were associated with generally negative perceptions of self and child, and negative mother-child interactions.     

Coping and sensitivity to aversive events

To test further the sensitivity to aversive events hypothesis, males and females varying in level of depressed mood listened to positive, negative, and neutral social scenes while psychophysiological measurements were obtained. In addition, the relations among response styles, coping strategies, and psychological adjustment were examined. Results indicated that only dysphoric females responded in ways consistent with the sensitivity hypothesis, exhibiting greater electrodermal responses to negative social scenes compared to nondysphoric females. No differences in psychophysiological sensitivity were found between dysphoric and nondysphoric males. Dysphoric students engaged in more ruminative type responses in reaction to their depressed mood and reported using more avoidant coping strategies in response to stress. In particular, females utilized more ruminative strategies in response to a depressed mood and more emotion-focused coping strategies in response to stressful events in general. The implications for these results are discussed within a diathesis-stress framework.     

Gaze behavior predicts memory bias for angry facial expressions in stable dysphoria

Interpersonal theories suggest that depressed individuals are sensitive to signs of interpersonal rejection, such as angry facial expressions. The present study examined memory bias for happy, sad, angry, and neutral facial expressions in stably dysphoric and stably nondysphoric young adults. Participants' gaze behavior (i.e., fixation duration, number of fixations, and distance between fixations) while viewing these facial expressions was also assessed. Using signal detection analyses, the dysphoric group had better accuracy on a surprise recognition task for angry faces than the nondysphoric group. Further, mediation analyses indicated that greater breadth of attentional focus (i.e., distance between fixations) accounted for enhanced recall of angry faces among the dysphoric group. There were no differences between dysphoria groups in gaze behavior or memory for sad, happy, or neutral facial expressions. Findings from this study identify a specific cognitive mechanism (i.e., breadth of attentional focus) that accounts for biased recall of angry facial expressions in dysphoria. This work also highlights the potential for integrating cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression.     

Dual-task attention deficits in dysphoric mood

The attentional functioning of nondysphoric, mildly dysphoric, and moderately to severely dysphoric college students was tested using the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. These groups performed equally well at reporting a single target appearing in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli. All groups showed an AB, with report sensitivity for a 2nd target being reduced when the 2 targets were presented less than 0.5 s apart. Nondysphoric and mildly dysphoric participants showed the same size ABs, but the ABs for moderately to severely dysphoric participants were larger and longer. As predicted, the results showed that moderately to severely dysphoric individuals have attentional impairments. These impairments, however, were evident only in the more demanding dual-task condition.     

Am I blue? Depressed mood and the consequences of self-focus for the interpretation and recall of ambiguous words

In two experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric students first concentrated on either self-focused or other-focused phrases and then performed an ostensibly unrelated task involving the interpretation of homographs with both personal and impersonal meanings. In Experiment 1, they constructed sentences for the homographs; dysphoric students' sentences were more emotionally negative (although not more personal) in the self-focused condition than in the other-focused condition. In Experiment 2, they freely associated to the homographs, and the percentage of personal meanings reflected by the associations revealed an effect of self versus other focus that depended on mood group. Following free associations, they attempted to recall the homographs. Dysphoric students (but not nondysphoric students) recalled a greater percentage of personally interpreted homographs if they had focused on self than if they had focused on other matters. In general, these results suggest that ruminative or self-focused thinking by people in depressed moods transfers to novel ambiguous situations, encouraging more negative interpretations and better recall of personal interpretations.     

Reversed mnemic neglect of self-threatening memories in dysphoria

Previous research has suggested that people have difficulties remembering information which is threatening to the self—an effect known as mnemic neglect. Three experiments are presented that examined mnemic neglect in dysphoria and whether dysphoric individuals show enhanced memory for self-threatening information. Pilot work determined that dysphoric participants rated central negative traits as more important than nondysphoric participants. In Experiment 1, dysphoric participants were found to have better memory for self-threatening information than nondysphoric participants. Enhanced recall of self-threatening memories was also found for unmodifiable (Experiment 2), and highly diagnostic (Experiment 3) self-threatening traits. The findings suggest that dysphoric participants show reversed mnemic neglect effects indicating enhanced access to negative information relating to the self.     

Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.     

Reversed mnemic neglect of self-threatening memories in dysphoria

Previous research has suggested that people have difficulties remembering information which is threatening to the self--an effect known as mnemic neglect. Three experiments are presented that examined mnemic neglect in dysphoria and whether dysphoric individuals show enhanced memory for self-threatening information. Pilot work determined that dysphoric participants rated central negative traits as more important than nondysphoric participants. In Experiment 1, dysphoric participants were found to have better memory for self-threatening information than nondysphoric participants. Enhanced recall of self-threatening memories was also found for unmodifiable (Experiment 2), and highly diagnostic (Experiment 3) self-threatening traits. The findings suggest that dysphoric participants show reversed mnemic neglect effects indicating enhanced access to negative information relating to the self.     

Depressive deficits in forgetting

The aim of this study was to investigate whether difficulties in forgetting (like difficulties in remembering) are associated with depressive states. First, dysphoric and nondysphoric students learned 40 word pairs, each consisting of a positive or negative adjective and a neutral noun (target). Next, the students practiced responding with some targets and suppressing others, when given the adjective as cue, for a varied number of repetitions. On the final test, they were told to disregard the prior instruction to suppress and to recall the target associated with every cue. Compared with nondysphoric students, dysphoric students recalled similar percentages of targets from sets assigned for response practice but higher percentages from sets assigned for suppression practice. The degree of forgetting showed some mood-congruent tendencies and was significantly correlated with self-report measures of rumination and unwanted thoughts.     

Satisfaction in interpersonal interactions as a function of similarity in level of dysphoria

This study compared dysphoric and nondysphoric male and female undergraduates as they conversed with dysphoric or nondysphoric undergraduates of the same sex. Subjects rated their satisfaction with the conversation after each turn. The results showed that people in homogeneous dyads (i.e., both partners were dysphoric or both partners were nondysphoric) were more satisfied with the interaction, and their satisfaction increased as the conversation proceeded. People in mixed dyads were less satisfied, perceived each other as colder, and spoke about increasingly negative topics. Thus, in accord with other research showing that similarity leads to liking, the crucial determinant of interactional satisfaction was neither the mood of the subject nor the mood of the partner, but their similarity in mood.     

How people make support judgments: individual differences in the traits used to infer supportiveness in others.

Social support and other social judgments are composed of several distinct components, of which relationship effects are an important part. With regard to support judgments, relationship effects refer to the fact that when judging the same targets, people differ systematically in whom they see as supportive. One explanation for this effect is that people differ in how they combine information about targets to judge supportiveness. Participants rated the supportiveness of hypothetical targets and targets from their own social networks. Multilevel modeling identified the traits participants used to make support judgments. There were significant differences in the extent to which participants used different target personality traits to judge supportiveness. In addition, participant neuroticism predicted the extent to which participants used target neuroticism and agreeableness to judge supportiveness.     

Congruence of personality and life events in depression

Consistent with the personality-event congruence hypothesis, highly sociotropic depressed patients (n = 19) reported more recent negative interpersonal events than negative autonomy events and more negative interpersonal events than did highly autonomous depressed patients (n = 22), for whom the hypothesis was not supported. There was no evidence of such congruence among nondepressed schizophrenic patients (n = 44). In a second study, there was significant personality-event congruence in dysphoric students (n = 26) but not in nondysphoric students (n = 56). Both the high-sociotropy and high-autonomy dysphoric groups separately yielded nonsignificant trends consistent with congruence. These findings add to the growing support for the importance of the sociotropy construct in depression and weaker support for the autonomy construct or its measurement, and they suggest that the congruence effect does not generalize to all psychopathologies.     

Depression-related differences in learning and forgetting responses to unrelated cues

Using the think/no-think paradigm, we examined the effect of a meaningful connection between emotionally neutral cues and targets on initial learning and later recall by students in dysphoric or nondysphoric mood states. Compared to meaningfully connected cue-target pairs, unrelated pairs were less easily learned and more easily forgotten, even when initial learning was controlled. Depressive deficits were obtained in initial learning (only marginally) and final recall. When examined separately within each cuing condition, the recall deficit associated with depressed mood was restricted to the unrelated condition, but when initial learning differences were controlled this deficit was only marginally significant. Results are discussed in relation to other recent findings concerning depression-related performance in this paradigm and to findings of depression and memory more generally.