Metacognition and depressive realism: Evidence for the level-of-depression account

Abstract

Introduction. The present study examined the relationship between metacognition (i.e., “thinking about thinking”) and depression. More specifically, the depressive realism hypothesis (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), which posits that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality than nondepressed people, was tested.

Methods. Nondepressed, mildly depressed, and moderately depressed individuals predicted their memory performance by making judgements of learning after each studied item. These predictions were then compared with actual performance on a free recall task to assess calibration, an index of metacognitive accuracy.

Results and conclusions. Consistent with the depressive realism hypothesis, mild depression was associated with better calibration than nondepression. However, this “sadder but wiser” phenomenon appears to only exist to point, as moderate depression and nondepression showed no calibration differences. Thus, the level-of-depression account of depressive realism is supported.

Keywords:

• Depression
• Depressive realism
• Judgements of learning
• Metacognition
• Metamemory

Acknowledgements

This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and Department of Defense Awards to Stimulate and Support Undergraduate Research Experiences (ASSURE) Programs, NSF Grant SES-0552876 to Edward L. DeLosh. The authors would like to thank Alexa Pizer for her contributions to this project.

Notes

¹We originally categorised the individuals scoring above 24 on the CES-D as “severely” depressed. Following the suggestion of a reviewer, we dropped the label of severe and replaced it with moderate. Indeed, this label seems more appropriate, especially given that this is not a clinical sample.

²Studies investigating the effects of depression on various outcome measures often control for level of mood during the experimental procedure as well. Given that the depression scores for present analyses were derived from the CES-D administration during testing, the assignment of individuals to different levels of depression does reflect their mood during the experiment.

³We do not want to leave the reader with the impression that this is the only possible explanation for depressive realism. Indeed, recent work suggests that this phenomenon might be explained in terms of contextual processing differences (Msetfi, Murphy, & Simpson, 2007) and/or passive responses (Blanco, Matute, & Vadillo, 2009) among those with depression.