Depressive Realism and Outcome Density Bias in Contingency Judgments: The Effect of the Context and Intertrial Interval.

Abstract

The perception of the effectiveness of instrumental actions is influenced by depressed mood. Depressive realism (DR) is the claim that depressed people are particularly accurate in evaluating instrumentality. In two experiments, the authors tested the DR hypothesis using an action-outcome contingency judgment task. DR effects were a function of intertrial interval length and outcome density, suggesting that depressed mood is accompanied by reduced contextual processing rather than increased judgment accuracy. The DR effect was observed only when participants were exposed to extended periods in which no actions or outcomes occurred. This implies that DR may result from an impairment in contextual processing rather than accurate but negative expectations. Therefore, DR is consistent with a cognitive distortion view of depression.

Depressive Realism: Wiser or Quieter?

“…Since Alloy and Abramson's seminal work in 1979, depressive realism has been a fertile research area and has provided interesting discussions among scientists (e.g., Ackermann & DeRubeis, 1991;Allan et al, 2007;Alloy & Clements, 1992;Haaga & Beck, 1995;Matute, 1996;Msetfi et al, 2005). We have proposed that differential probability of responding, as a function of mood, plays a relevant role in depressive realism: In contrast to nondysphoric individuals, who tend to respond as much as they can to obtain a desired outcome, depressive individuals are more passive, and this provides them with more comprehensive exposure to what happens both when they respond as well as when they do not respond.…”

“…Those with a direct score of 9 or above were included in the dysphoric group, whereas participants who scored below 9 were assigned to the nondysphoric group. This cutoff point was the same already used in many other studies about depressive realism (e.g., Alloy & Abramson, 1979;Msetfi et al, 2005) and implies not a clinical categorization but, rather, a common way to identify mildly depressed individuals among a typical population of college students (this is the reason why we prefer to use the term dysphoric instead of depressed). This resulted in the classification of 41 participants as nondysphoric and 25 as dysphoric.…”

“…Some interesting examples are the percentage of reinforcement, also called outcome density (Alloy & Abramson, 1979;Matute, 1995;Rudski et al, 1999), skill-related factors (Thompson, Armstrong, & Thomas, 1998), valence of outcomes (Aeschleman, Rosen, & Williams, 2002;Alloy & Abramson, 1979), length of the intertrial intervals (Msetfi, Murphy, & Simpson, 2007;Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005), number of trials (Shanks & Dickinson, 1987), delay of reinforcement (Rudski, 2000), and probability of responding (Matute, 1996). The present research is concerned with this latter factor.…”

A resilience framework for promoting stable remission from depression

“…contextual processing during cognitive tasks (Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005), and this inflexibility may be related to the high levels of internal attention seen in maladaptive rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008). There is meta-analytic evidence that emotional inflexibility prospectively predicts poorer courses of depression (Morris, Bylsma, & Rottenberg, 2009), and increased stimulus-appropriate emotional reactivity -even to negative stimuli -prospectively predicts recovery from depression (Rottenberg, Salomon, Gross, & Gotlib, 2005).…”

Evidence for an illusion of causality when using the Implicit Association Test to measure learning

“…Many experiments conducted with this or related tasks have found that even in situations in which there is no statistical relationship between the cue and the outcome, the participants still report that such a relationship exists if the outcome occurred in many trials (Allan & Jenkins, 1983;Allan, Siegel, & Tangen, 2005;Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, in press;Musca, Vadillo, Blanco, & Matute, 2010). This outcome-density effect also takes place in situations in which participants are not judging the relationship between a neutral cue and an outcome, but the relationship between their own behavior and a consequence (Alloy & Abramson, 1979;Matute, 1995;Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005;Shanks, 1985Shanks, , 1987.…”