Are positive psychology exercises helpful for people with depressive personality styles?

Abstract

Two exercises involving gratitude and uplifting music were tested for their ability to improve well-being in self-critical and needy individuals. In this study, 772 adults completed measures of depressive symptoms, physical symptoms, happiness, and self-esteem and then practiced the gratitude, music, or control exercise (recalling early childhood memories) for 1 week. Follow-up measures were administered after the intervention period, and 1, 3, and 6 months later. Participants in both the gratitude and the music condition reported greater increases in happiness over time than participants in the control condition. Self-critics were particularly responsive to the gratitude intervention, whereas needy individuals found the exercises ineffective and even detrimental to their self-esteem. These results highlight the importance of identifying individual differences in response to positive psychology exercises.

Keywords:

• positive psychology
• self-criticism
• neediness
• well-being

Notes

1. Due to concern over the effects of payment on participant outcomes, this variable was controlled for in all analyses.

2. Items loading onto the efficacy factor involve the endorsement of a sense of confidence about personal resources and capacities rather than symptoms of depression. Since this study is concerned primarily with investigating vulnerabilities to depression, efficacy scores were not analyzed.

3. SC and Neediness were entered as continuous variables and interpreted as such throughout.

4. To determine if depressive symptoms predicted changes in well-being, baseline score on the CES-D was also explored as a potential predictor variable for the other three dependent measures. Using the same analytic strategy as the one used for SC and neediness, CES-D scores did not significantly interact with the exercise effects on well-being over time. Thus, participants’ baseline level of depressive symptomology was not an important predictor of the effectiveness of the exercises.

5. All the analyses were also run for the data including only the baseline and 1-week post-test measures to explore whether there were any immediate effects of the exercises that may have dissipated over the long-term. For brevity's sake, these analyses are not reported here in detail. However, the 1-week effects were generally consistent with the long-term effects, and several new group differences emerged that reinforced the notion that self-critics fared significantly better in the gratitude condition.