Egocentrism in sub-clinical depression

ABSTRACT

Depression is marked by rigid thinking and the inability to generate different and more positive views on the self. The current study conceptualises this a perspective-taking deficit, which is defined as a deficit in the ability to overcome one’s egocentrism. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with depression are impaired in Theory of Mind reasoning and empathy – two social cognitions that involve cognitive and affective perspective-taking. Here, it was investigated whether these deficits generalise to visuo-spatial perspective-taking. To test this, a convenience sample (N = 268; n = 62 high depressive symptoms; n = 206 healthy control participants) completed a test-battery including measures of cognitive and visuo-spatial perspective-taking and closely matched cognitive and visuo-spatial control tasks. The results showed that individuals exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms were specifically impaired on both perspective-taking tasks but performed equally well on the control tasks. Interventions to combat rigid thinking in depression are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• perspective-taking
• empathy
• theory of mind
• grounded cognition

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Laura Fiedler, Sophie Moritz, Karoline Schmid, Marie-Ann Ziegler, Sebastian Peter, Florian Steinbichl, and Peter Streun for help with the data collection; Giti Bakhtiari, Lea Geraedts, Anand Krishna, and Till Schöllhammer for reading the stories for the IMT; Anne Böckler-Raettig for providing us with the German version of the IMT; Felix Schönbrodt and E.J. Wagenmakers for advice on the Bayesian analyses; and two anonymous reviewers for helpful literature suggestions and advice on the statistical analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number ER 887/1-1].