Are Depressive Symptoms Positively or Negatively Associated With the Illusion of Control?

Abstract

This research addressed whether depressive symptoms were positively or negatively associated with the extent to which research participants showed an illusion of control. In Study 1, 85 female college students participated in a psychokinesis (PK) task and completed a magical ideation scale. Consistent with research reported by Thalbourne and others (e.g., Thalbourne & Delin, 1994), participants who showed higher levels of depressive symptoms also showed higher illusory control scores. In Study 2, 105 participants completed a precognition task and a PK task as well as a judgment of contingency task used by Alloy and Abramson (1979) to test the so-called "depressive realism" hypothesis. Factor analysis confirmed two factors, one on which the judgments on the Precognition and PK tasks loaded and one on which the judgment on the contingency task loaded. Results replicated the finding in Study 1 for the paranormal tasks. For the contingency task, consistent with Alloy and Abramson's depressive realism model, participants showing higher levels of depressive symptoms also showed lower illusory control scores. Results are related to research that documents a relation between various forms of magical thinking and psychopathology.Considerable research suggests that people who manifest, or are prone toward, certain forms of psychopathology report higher levels of magical or other types of paranormal beliefs. Meehl (cited in Eckblad & Chapman, 1983) noted that people who were prone toward manifesting schizophrenia were high in magical ideation, which he defined as a "belief, quasi-belief, or semi-serious entertainment of the possibility that events which, according to causal concepts of this SOCIAL

Mediating Role of Activity Level in the Depressive Realism Effect

“…Interestingly, Alloy and Abramson [1] found that mildly depressed participants were better at detecting the absence of control over the light than nondepressed participants were; nondepressed participants systematically overestimated the contingency between their actions and the uncontrollable outcome, thereby exhibiting an illusion of control [4]–[6]. Alloy and Abramson’s finding soon became known as “depressive realism” [7] and has been replicated several times using different tasks and procedures [8]–[12].…”

Recent developments in the experimental investigation of the illusion of control. A meta‐analytic review

“…Although initial studies (e.g., Langer, 1975;Langer & Roth, 1975) addressed the problem of illusory control only in uncontrollable situations, Thompson et al (2007) have recently demonstrated that judgments of illusory control can also be traced in situations where some degree of controllability exists. Since Langer's seminal experiments in the field, the concept of "illusion of control" has been investigated in studies from a wide range of domains, particularly social psychology (e.g., Langens, 2007a;Langer, 1975;Langer & Roth, 1975;Morris & Sim, 1998;Thompson et al, 2007), mental health (e.g., Alloy & Abramson, 1979;Presson & Benassi, 2003;Reuven-Magril, Dar, & Liberman, 2008), gambling behavior (e.g., Coventry & Norman, 1998;Dannewitz & Weatherly, 2007;Cantinotti, Ladouceur, & Jacques, 2004;Ladouceur & Sevigny, 2005), motivation and emotion (Biner, Johnston, Summers, & Chudzynski, 2009;Langens, 2007b;Rudski & Edwards, 2007), and decision making (Fenton-O'Creevy, Nicholson, Soane, & Willman, 2003;Kahai, Solieri, & Felo, 1998).…”

“…A meta-analysis conducted by Presson and Benassi (1996) summarized the experimental results on the illusion of control since the concept was introduced in the literature (Langer, 1975) until 1996. Since then, substantial develop-ments in the field have occurred with respect to new theoretical conceptualizations and explanatory theories of the illusion of control such as the control heuristic (Thompson, Armstrong, & Thomas, 1998;Thompson et al, 2004Thompson et al, , 2007; new factors were found to influence perceptions of control in chance-based situations: the need to avoid aversive outcomes (Biner et al, 2009), near wins and near losses (Wohl & Enzle, 2003), the experience of power (Fast, Gruenfeld, Sivanathan, & Galinsky, 2009), and the illusion of control paradigm has been applied to more interest domains: decision support systems (Kahai et al, 1998) or obsessivecompulsive behavior (Reuven-Magril et al, 2008).…”

Emotional recognition in depressed epilepsy patients

“…Lewinsohn et al [36] suggested that depressed patients view the world more realistically than nondepressed patients-a notion that refuted the established theory of Beck [37], who had claimed that depressed patients negatively skew reality. Depressive realism is supported by the findings of other research [38,39], which suggests that nondepressed patients distort the world in an overly optimistic manner, allowing them to feel in control of their environment. In the current study, it is possible that the ND group demonstrated poor ER from facial expressions because of a positive bias.…”