Mediating Role of Activity Level in the Depressive Realism Effect

Abstract

Several classic studies have concluded that the accuracy of identifying uncontrollable situations depends heavily on depressive mood. Nondepressed participants tend to exhibit an optimistic illusion of control, whereas depressed participants tend to better detect a lack of control. Recently, we suggested that the different activity levels (measured as the probability of responding during a contingency learning task) exhibited by depressed and nondepressed individuals is partly responsible for this effect. The two studies presented in this paper provide further support for this mediational hypothesis, in which mood is the distal cause of the illusion of control operating through activity level, the proximal cause. In Study 1, the probability of responding, P(R), was found to be a mediator variable between the depressive symptoms and the judgments of control. In Study 2, we intervened directly on the mediator variable: The P(R) for both depressed and nondepressed participants was manipulated through instructions. Our results confirm that P(R) manipulation produced differences in the participants’ perceptions of uncontrollability. Importantly, the intervention on the mediator variable cancelled the effect of the distal cause; the participants’ judgments of control were no longer mood dependent when the P(R) was manipulated. This result supports the hypothesis that the so-called depressive realism effect is actually mediated by the probability of responding.

Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment

“…Elucidation of the illusion of control that emphasizes the role of coincidences between behavior and environmental changes is an important step toward providing a basic background for understanding behavioral and learning mechanisms that are related to the origins of false beliefs (Blanco, 2017;Blanco et al, 2009Blanco et al, , 2011Blanco et al, , 2012Blanco et al, , 2013Matute, 1996;Matute et al, 2007). The present data support this approach to better understand the general notion of the illusion of control.…”

Interactive effects of the probability of the cue and the probability of the outcome on the overestimation of null contingency

“…In fact, as we noted in the introduction, many of the previous experimental studies that reported cue-and outcome-density biases had used a high-P(O) condition (e.g., Blanco et al, 2011Blanco et al, , 2012Hannah & Beneteau, 2009;Matute, 1996;Matute et al, 2011;Perales et al, 2005) or a medium/high-P(C) condition (e.g., Msetfi et al, 2007Msetfi et al, , 2005, respectively. Our results complement these studies, because they provide evidence for the weakening of the biases in backgrounds of low P(O) and low P(C).…”

“…Alternatively, they might interact such that a high, or at least a medium, level of P(O) is necessary in order to show a cue-density effect. The latter possibility has been implicitly assumed in studies that have explored the effects of manipulating P(C) without a low-P(O) condition (Blanco et al, 2009(Blanco et al, , 2012Matute, 1996). Note that the manipulation of the two marginal probabilities in a factorial design while keeping a fixed contingency is possible in a zero-contingency setting only.…”

“…Focusing on the standard trial-by-trial procedure, studies reporting outcomedensity effects in null-contingency settings have generally kept P(C) constant at a medium level (e.g., Msetfi et al, 2007Msetfi et al, , 2005Shanks & Dickinson, 1987). Conversely, studies reporting a cue-density effect have been conducted at a high (e.g., Blanco et al, 2009Blanco et al, , 2011Blanco et al, , 2012Matute, 1996; or medium (e.g., Hannah & Beneteau, 2009;Perales et al, 2005) level of P(O). Therefore, it is unclear whether outcome-or cue-density effects may appear in low P(C) and low P(O) settings, respectively, in the standard contingencylearning task.…”

Response-independent outcomes impact response rates and judgments of control differentially depending on rate of response-dependent outcomes

“…This is particularly noted when rates of response-dependent reinforcement are low (Lattal & Bryan, 1976). Similarly, in the associative conditioning literature, potentiation rather than overshadowing of learning about a target by another cue, when the target-outcome relationship is weak, has been found (Clarke, Westbrook, & Irwin, 1979;Schachtman, Reed, & Hall, 1987).Thus, there are multiple demonstrations that responseindependent outcomes can sometimes facilitate human causal judgments and also rates of instrumental conditioning in nonhumans (Blanco et al, 2012;Lattal & Bryan, 1976). If this type of effect were noted using human participants in a Bnaturalistic^judgment paradigm (i.e., one in which outcomes had some value, see Matute, 1996), it is unclear how it could easily be accommodated into many theories of judgments of control that assume competition between the target response and the context as sources of prediction for the outcome (Allan, 1993;Cheng, 1997).…”