The sad truth about depressive realism

Abstract

In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are nondepressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high—the “outcome-density effect”. In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed “depressive realism”, and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as “sadder but wiser”. We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.*

*The preparation of this paper was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to L.G.A. and S.S. and by a grant from the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse to S.S.

Notes

*The preparation of this paper was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to L.G.A. and S.S. and by a grant from the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse to S.S.

¹ Many of the papers concerned with contingency judgements and depressive realism cite unpublished experiments. In our review, we only include published work.

² It should be noted that although there were negative contingencies, the rating scale ranged from 0 to 100.

³ Alloy and Abramson (1979) do note that not all researchers agree with their interpretation of learned helpless theory (see p. 457).

⁴ Alloy and Abramson (1979) used “reinforcement” interchangeably with “outcome”.

⁵Alloy, Abramson, and collaborators published a series of papers in the 1980s. In our review we have included only papers directly concerned with mood effects on judgements of contingency. We have not included papers where the main focus was on learned helplessness theory (e.g., Abramson, Alloy, & Rosoff, 1981; Alloy & Abramson, 1982).

⁶ The three studies reported in this chapter have not been published in a journal article. The description in the chapter is brief, and neither standard errors nor statistical analyses are reported.