The beneficial and detrimental effects of major depression on intuitive decision-making

ABSTRACT

Intuitions play a central role in everyday life decision-making but little is known regarding this capacity during depression. Thus, in Study 1, N = 39 depressed in-patients completed two well-established tasks, assessing intuitions of visual and semantic coherence. In the semantic coherence task, patients judged whether presented words triads were coherent (e.g. SALT DEEP FOAM, related to SEA) or not (e.g. DREAM BALL BOOK, no denominator). In the visual coherence task, patients judged whether blurred pictures depicted real-life objects (coherent) or not (incoherent). Results showed that higher depressive symptomatology was associated with impaired intuitions of semantic coherence but with enhanced intuitions of visual coherence. In Study 2, visual coherence intuitions of depressed patients (n = 27) were compared to healthy control participants (n = 30). Depressed patients outperformed the healthy control subjects in the visual coherence task. This pattern of findings shows both detrimental and beneficial decisional consequences of depression.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• intuition
• decision-making

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Unger and Nicole Plinz in Hamburg-Harburg and the AMEOS clinic, in Hildesheim for their friendly support in conducting the research. We further thank Julian Horstmann for his help in programming and Eyleen Besser, Vlada Khallieva Carmen Rietzel, Karolin Schwarz, Lena Zepter for their help in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by research funds of the Asklepios Clinics Hamburg GmbH.