Clinical depression and day-to-day social interaction in a community sample

Adult participants recruited from the community, one half of whom met criteria for clinical depression, described their day-to-day social interactions using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. Compared with the nondepressed participants, depressed participants found their interactions to be less enjoyable and less intimate, and they felt less influence over their interactions. Differences between the two groups in intimacy occurred only in interactions with close relations and not in interactions with nonintimates, and differences in influence were more pronounced for those who were cohabiting than for those who were not. There were no differences in how socially active depressed and nondepressed people were or in the amount of contact they had with different relational partners.     

Performance evaluation in subclinical depression: It looks like I did as poorly as I expected to

The study tested the hypothesis that subclinically depressed individuals' unduly negative performance evaluations reflect self-confirmatory processing: their performance evaluations are biased toward the confirmation of their negative success expectations. To test this hypothesis, 17 subclinically depressed and 47 nondepressed participants indicated their success expectations and their performance standards for an upcoming test of academic aptitude. After taking the test, they evaluated their test performance without explicit feedback about how well they had done. Three findings suggest that the less favorable performance evaluations of subclinically depressed participants were due to self-confirmatory processing: (a) success expectations covaried with performance evaluations, (b) depressed participants had less favorable success expectations, and (c) after statistically removing the effect of expectations on performance evaluations, depressed-nondepressed differences in performance evaluations were eliminated. There was no evidence that overly stringent standards accounted for the relatively negative performance evaluations of subclinically depressed participants.Portions of this article were presented at the Annual Convention of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, November 1996.     

Efficiency and automaticity of self-schema processing in clinical depressives

In this study, female clinical depressives and nondepressed control subjects made a series of self-referent personality judgments concerning depressed and nondepressed content personal adjectives. Employing rating times (RTs) for the personality decisions as a dependent measure, it was found that both clinical depressives and nondepressed psychiatric controls processed self-schema congruent content more efficiently (with quicker RTs), than incongruent content. To further test for the automaticity of self-schema processing, half the depressed and nondepressed adjectives were rated while subjects held six digits in memory (a concurrent memory load). Here it was found that the independent variable of memory load (zero vs. six digits) did not interact significantly with the remaining independent variables of groups (clinical depressives, psychiatric nondepressives, normal nondepressives), decision type (yes, no), and adjective content (depressed, nondepressed). The lack of any interactions involving the memory load factor provides initial evidence for self-schema processing as an automatic process, rather than as a process that demands attentional capacity.This research was supported, in part, by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship to Michael R. MacDonald.     

Depression, realism, and the overconfidence effect: are the sadder wiser when predicting future actions and events?

Do depressed individuals make more realistic judgments than their nondepressed peers in real world settings? Depressed and nondepressed Ss in 2 studies were asked to make predictions about future actions and outcomes that might occur in their personal academic and social worlds. Both groups of Ss displayed overconfidence, that is, they overestimated the likelihood that their predictions would prove to be accurate. Of key importance, depressed Ss were less accurate in their predictions, and thus more overconfident, than their nondepressed counterparts. These differences arose because depressed Ss (a) were more likely to predict the occurrence of low base-rate events and (b) were less likely to be correct when they made optimistic predictions (i.e., stated that positive events would occur or that aversive outcomes would not). Discussion focuses on implications of these findings for the depressive realism hypothesis.     

The Impact of Depression on Self–Other Discrepancies in Decision Making

Although there is a small but growing body of literature on how people make risky decisions for others and predict others' decisions, results seem to be contradictory. The authors contribute to the understanding of these mixed results by investigating how depression affects self–other discrepancies in decision making and the psychological processes that underlie these discrepancies. In an experiment, depressed and nondepressed individuals read a series of scenarios involving decisions about health, money, and interpersonal relationships. They then indicated which of two options they would choose for themselves or for another person, or predicted which option this person would choose for himself or herself. Finally, participants reported benefits and drawbacks of the decisions (i.e., cognitions) and feelings about risk. Depressed individuals were less prone to bias when they predicted others' decisions than nondepressed individuals. Feelings about risk played a key role in determining the direction and the magnitude of this bias. In contrast, both depressed and nondepressed individuals showed bias when they made decisions for others. This bias affected their decisions in opposing ways and was determined by cognitions. This bias is consistent with literature showing that depression is associated with an increased sensitivity to social risks. The authors provide a theoretical explanation of self–other discrepancies in decision making in depressed and nondepressed individuals and conclude that the results support the assumption that depression is associated with psychological processes whose role is to increase sensitivity to social threats rather than with a more general negative bias in cognitive functioning. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?

How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were present with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.     

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.     

Depressive realism and clinical depression

Depressive realism suggests that depressed individuals make more accurate judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts. However, most studies demonstrating this phenomenon were conducted in nonclinical samples. In this study, psychiatric patients who met criteria for major depressive disorder underestimated control in a contingent situation and were consistently more negative in their judgments than were nondepressed controls. Depressed patients were less likely than their nondepressed counterparts to overestimate control in a noncontingent situation, but largely because they perceived receiving less reinforcement. Depressed patients were no more likely to use the appropriate logical heuristic to generate their judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts and each appeared to rely on different primitive heuristics. Depressed patients were consistently more negative than their nondepressed counterparts and when they did appear to be more “accurate” in their judgments of control (as in the noncontingent situation) it was largely because they applied the wrong heuristic to less accurate information. These findings do not support the notion of depressive realism and suggest that depressed patients distort their judgments in a characteristically negative fashion.     

Crying threshold and intensity in major depressive disorder

Clinical lore suggests that depression is associated with frequent and intense crying. To test these postulations empirically, a standardized cry-evoking stimulus was presented to depressed and nondepressed participants, and their likelihood of crying and the magnitude of crying-related changes in their emotion experience, behavior, and autonomic physiology were compared. Unexpectedly, crying was no more likely in depressed than in nondepressed participants. Within the nondepressed group, participants who cried exhibited increases in the report and display of sadness and had greater cardiac and electrodermal activation than did participants who did not cry. There was less evidence of this crying-related emotional activation within the depressed group. The lack of emotional activation among clinically depressed participants who cried provides a tantalizing clue concerning how emotions are dysregulated in this disorder.     

The enduring effect of availability

The present study addressed whether experienced ease of retrieval of autobiographical events affects trait judgments made immediately and after a delay (Experiment 1) and whether this influence is modulated by either of two discounting instructions (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants first attempted to retrieve 6 or 12 personal memories for different traits and then made ease of retrieval and self-trait judgments immediately or 1 week later. In Experiment 2, participants made immediate ratings and then delayed ratings under 3 instructional manipulations: a generic instruction to repeat these judgments, to make these ratings after they were reminded of their original recall total, or to make these ratings after they had their retrieval ease discounted or augmented. In each experiment, an enduring effect of availability was obtained in that the relationship between ease of retrieval and self-trait rating was only slightly affected by the delay. Being reminded of the original number of recalled memories nullified the relationship between ease of retrieval and trait rating. However, discounting or augmenting ease of retrieval, which altered ease of retrieval ratings, did not. Potential explanations for an enduring effect of availability are discussed.     

Social context and perceived task difficulty as mediators of depressive self-evaluation

This study examined two separate, but potentially interactive, influences on depressive self-evaluation: social context and perceptions of task difficulty. First, it was hypothesized that, if negative self-evaluations of depressed individuals are motivated by a desire to elicit attention and sympathy from others, depressed subjects should evaluate themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects in a public setting, but not when they make self-evaluative judgments in private. Second, it was hypothesized that negative self-evaluation results from a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy, i.e., if a task is easy, a given score would be evaluated more poorly than if the task were difficult. It was found that the self-evaluations of depressed subjects were influenced by the social context, but not always in a negative direction. Depressed subjects did not differ from nondepressed subjects when performance evaluations were made in private. In a public condition, depressed subjects evaluated themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects following an easy task, but evaluated themselves more positively following a difficult task. Depressed subjects did not evidence a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy. Depressed subjects did rate the tasks to be more difficult for themselves than they thought they would be for others and this expectancy was predictive of negative self-evaluation. These results were discussed in terms of alternative self-presentation motives and theories of social cognition. Self-evaluation often involves social comparison and researchers need to attend to the potentially complex interactions among social and cognitive processes.I would like to thank Deborah Davis and Paul Westerholm for their help in data collection, Ruth Maki for her statistical expertise, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Portions of this paper were presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, 1989.     

Specifying the Nature of Social Skill Deficits Associated With Depression

According to the social skill deficit theory of depression, people who lack social skills are unable to obtain positive social reinforcement and thus become depressed. However, past research is replete with mixed findings on the social skill-depression relationship. The present research was designed to overcome two prominent shortcomings in this research: poor operationalizations of social skill and constraining experimental procedures. In Study 1, 67 depressed and 74 nondepressed subjects engaged in an unstructured interaction with knowledge that they were being videotaped. In Study 2, 40 depressed and 61 nondepressed subjects were surreptitiously videotaped as they waited with another student for a study to begin. Analyses of subjects' social skill in these interactions indicated that depression is associated with a partial social skill deficit, most notable in terms of excessive social anxiety, low motivation to communicate with others, low social expressivity, and diminished behavioral involvement in Study 2. Partners of depressed subjects also showed low behavioral involvement in Study 2. However, on some aspects of social skill, depressed subjects appeared no different from their nondepressed peers. Depressed subjects' social skill was most deficient when they were given no instruction to interact and had no knowledge that they were being recorded.     

Does easily learned mean easily remembered?: it depends on your beliefs about intelligence

Because numerous studies have shown that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, a single dominant heuristic, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), has been posited to explain how people interpret encoding fluency when assessing their own memory. However, the inferences people draw from feelings of encoding fluency may vary with their beliefs about why information is easy or effortful to encode. We conducted two experiments in which participants studied word lists and then predicted their future recall of those items. Results revealed that subjects who viewed intelligence as fixed, and who tended to interpret effortful encoding as indicating that they had reached the limits of their ability, used the ELER heuristic to make judgments of learning. However, subjects who viewed intelligence as malleable, and who tended to interpret effortful encoding as indicating greater engagement in learning, did not use the ELER heuristic and at times predicted greater memory for items that they found more effortful to learn.     

Depressive Cognition: A Test of Depressive Realism Versus Negativity Using General Knowledge Questions

This research is an examination of whether cognition in depressed individuals incorporates a realistic view of the world or a general tendency toward negativity. Participants provided two types of probability judgments of the likelihood that they correctly answered general knowledge questions: the probability that they correctly answered each of the individual questions and an aggregate judgment, after completing the questionnaire, of the percentage of all the questions they thought they had correctly answered. These tasks generally elicit overconfidence and accuracy in nondepressives. In accord with theories of both depressive realism and general negativity, in their item-by-item assessments of their answers to the individual questions, depressed participants demonstrated less overconfidence than nondepressed participants. In accord with the theory of general negativity but not with the theory of depressive realism, however, depressed participants demonstrated underconfidence in their aggregate judgments. The implications of these findings on theories of depressive cognition are discussed.     

Depressive cognition: a test of depressive realism versus negativity using general knowledge questions

This research is an examination of whether cognition in depressed individuals incorporates a realistic view of the world or a general tendency toward negativity. Participants provided two types of probability judgments of the likelihood that they correctly answered general knowledge questions: the probability that they correctly answered each of the individual questions and an aggregate judgment, after completing the questionnaire, of the percentage of all the questions they thought they had correctly answered. These tasks generally elicit overconfidence and accuracy in nondepressives. In accord with theories of both depressive realism and general negativity, in their item-by-item assessments of their answers to the individual questions, depressed participants demonstrated less overconfidence than nondepressed participants. In accord with the theory of general negativity but not with the theory of depressive realism, however, depressed participants demonstrated underconfidence in their aggregate judgments. The implications of these findings on theories of depressive cognition are discussed.     

Defocused attention in depressed mood: evidence from source monitoring

The authors suggest that depressed mood is associated with a defocused mode of attention, allowing irrelevant information to be noticed and processed more than in nondepressed states. Working on a source monitoring task, subclinically depressed college students selected with the Beck Depression Inventory (A. T. Beck, 1967; D. Kammer, 1983) had better memory for irrelevant stimulus aspects than nondepressed control students. However, depressed students' performance on the relevant stimulus aspects was unimpaired. These results are in conflict with a capacity reduction view of depressed mood and support the hypothesized altered, defocused mode, in which attentional resources are more evenly allocated across various aspects of the materials. The results are discussed within the framework of adaptive functions of emotional states.     

Remembering the good, forgetting the bad: intentional forgetting of emotional material in depression

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases.     

Retrospective and prospective metacognitive judgments in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

A growing body of research suggests that some non-human animals are capable of making accurate metacognitive judgments. In previous studies, non-human animals have made either retrospective or prospective judgments (about how they did on a test or how they will do on a test, respectively). These two types of judgments are dissociable in humans. The current study tested the abilities of two rhesus macaque monkeys to make both retrospective and prospective judgments about their performance on the same memory task. Both monkeys had been trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments. Both monkeys successfully demonstrated transfer of retrospective metacognitive judgments to the new memory task. Furthermore, both monkeys transferred their retrospective judgments to the prospective task (one, immediately, and one, following the elimination of a response bias). This study is the first to demonstrate both retrospective and prospective monitoring abilities in the same monkeys and on the same task, suggesting a greater level of flexibility in animals’ metacognitive monitoring abilities than has been reported previously.     

Judgment of contingency: cognitive biases in depressed and nondepressed subjects

In this research I investigated whether the use of relevant affective outcomes influences depressed and nondepressed subjects' judgment of contingency. Similar to previous studies (Alloy & Abramson, 1979, Experiments 1 and 2), Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that when the outcome is affectively neutral (i.e., the onset of a light) depressed subjects make accurate judgments of contingency, whereas nondepressed subjects show (in noncontingent situations) a significant illusion of control. In Experiments 3 and 4 (a contingency situation and a noncontingency situation, respectively) different types of sentences (negative self-referent, negative other-referent, positive self-referent, positive other-referent) were used as outcomes. Although depressed subjects were more reluctant to show biased judgments than were the nondepressed subjects, in noncontingency situations depressed subjects made overestimated judgments of contingency when the outcomes were negative self-referent sentences. Results are discussed with regard to current cognitive theories of depression, particularly the learned helplessness model.