Research in the area of self-awareness theory has indicated that self-focused attention consistently produces both an increase in perceived intensity of affect and enhanced accuracy of self-reports. The present studies consider these effects in relation to the technique of self-confrontation as used in psychotherapy. In the first study, members of two different clinical populations (alcoholics and general psychiatric patients) either were or were not made self-aware and then were asked to self-report on their psychiatric problems and their mood states. Results indicated that self-awareness did increase the negative mood states for the psychiatric patients, and it also apparently increased the accuracy with which both patient groups reported on their history of hospitalization. In the second study self-awareness once again exacerbated the reported negative affect of a group of depressed psychiatric patients and enhanced the accuracy with which they reported on their hospitalizations. Additional analyses indicated that although the psychiatric patients generally felt worse when self-aware, they were also more accurate in their self-reports, including descriptions of their problems. The effects of self-awareness on members of a clinical population are discussed and related to self-confrontation techniques.
We express our appreciation to Jessica Kohout and Marlene Wicherski for providing the analyses of APA data and to Susan Houston, Leslie Cameron, and Le Anne Wisnieski for their indispensable staff support to the task force. Helen S. Astin, Phyllis Katz, and Georgine Pion served as consultants to the task force and provided invaluable feedback. We also thank Linda Zimler and Sam Bedinger of the National Center for Education Statistics for their help in obtaining and analyzing the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty and Allen Meyer for his helpful feedback on successive drafts.Requests for copies of the full task force report should be sent to the Women'
Cognitive theorists have suggested that in depression, negative environmental events can activate self-schemata that serve to structure the processing of information in a negative fashion. The present study addressed this issue by providing both nondepressed subjects and subjects with elevated levels of depression either success or failure feedback and by examining the personal favorability of trait adjectives recalled in a depth-of-processing paradigm. Results indicated that at the self-referent processing level, depressed subjects did not respond to success feedback by processing and recalling more favorable self-references as did nondepressed subjects. These findings were interpreted to suggest that depressed individuals suffer from a deficit in the ability to activate positive self-schemata with which to process positive self-relevant information and not necessarily from an oversensitivity in the processing of negative information.In recent years, information-processing approaches have generated increasing interest among a variety of researchers and theoreticians. One area of theory and research that has employed information-processing constructs is depression. Beck (1967Beck ( , 1976Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979), for example, proposed that when depressed, individuals process information in such a way as to construe themselves, their environment, and their future in a nonveridically negative fashion. Further, according to Beck (1967), as individuals process predominantly negative information about themselves, their depressive affect is maintained and/or exacerbated. Thus, how individuals process information while depressed may be a critical factor in determining the essential characteristics of the depressed state.An experimental method employed to explore information processing in depression is the depth-(or levels) of-processing para-The authors would like to thank Raymond M. Zurawski for his comments on the present article and Elizabeth Napshin for her help in the collection and scoring of the data.Requests for reprints should be sent to Rick E.
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