Enhanced attention to context: An intervention that increases perceived control in mild depression

Abstract

People perceive that they have control over events to the extent that the same events do not occur outside of their control, randomly, in the environment or context. Therefore, perceived control should be enhanced if there is a large contrast between one's own control and the control that the context itself seems to exert over events. Given that depression is associated with low perceived control, we tested the hypothesis that enhanced attentional focus to context will increase perceived control in people with and without depression. A total of 106 non-depressed and mildly depressed participants completed a no control zero-contingency task with low and high outcome probability conditions. In the experimental context-focus group, participants were instructed to attend to the context, whereas in the control group, participants were instructed to attend to their thoughts. Irrespective of attentional focus, non-depressed participants displayed illusory control. However, people with mild depression responded strongly to the attention focus manipulation. In the control group, they evidenced low perceived control with classic depressive realism effects. In the experimental group, when asked to focus on the context in which events took place, participants with mild depression displayed enhanced perceived control or illusory control, similar to non-depressed participants. Findings are discussed in relation to whether depression effects on perceived control represent tendencies towards realism or attentional aspects of depressive thoughts.

Positive and negative implications of the causal illusion

“…Recently, Msetfi and colleagues (Msetfi, Brosnan, & Cavus, 2016;Msetfi, Kumar, Harmer, & Murphy, 2016) have tested two procedures to induce causal illusions in depressed people. Recall that, according to these authors' hypothesis, non-depressed people develop illusions partly because they incorporate the contextual information of the ITIs as additional type d trials, which inflates the perceived contingency.…”

Using Mobile Phones to Examine and Enhance Perceptions of Control in Mildly Depressed and Nondepressed Volunteers: Intervention Study (Preprint)

“…Therefore, if accurate, people's perceptions of control should not differ between these two conditions. However, numerous studies have shown that healthy people exposed to a high outcome density condition tend to over-estimate their control relative to the low outcome density interventions have begun to be tested [20].…”

“…In other words, the context is a key conditionalizer of control experience [e.g., 22] and has been indicated as a key factor that discriminates healthy and depressed people in their control perceptions [16]. These findings lend themselves to interventions that will influence people's perceptions of alternative causes and enhance their feelings of control [20].…”

Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent

“…These strategies could be used either to encourage healthy illusions, or to prevent the harmful ones. For example, the depressive realism effect can be neutralized by encouraging people to process contextual information [ 27 ], and symptoms of laboratory-induced panic attacks can be reduced by inducing an illusion of control [ 22 ].…”

“…Thus, the ability to encode and retrieve the individual features of visual scenes appears to be especially relevant for contingency learning in those situations in which the target stimuli (cue and outcome) must be pulled out from complex visual scenes that include additional elements (context). Although a deeper explanation will go beyond the scope of this report, it is worth noting that associative explanations of causal biases in adults attribute a significant role to contextual processing [ 27 , 71 ]. In sum, it seems reasonable to propose that children younger than ten years old may exhibit different processing of visual configurations that could affect their causal judgment under outcome-density manipulations.…”