Enhanced attention to context: An intervention that increases perceived control in mild depression

Abstract

People perceive that they have control over events to the extent that the same events do not occur outside of their control, randomly, in the environment or context. Therefore, perceived control should be enhanced if there is a large contrast between one's own control and the control that the context itself seems to exert over events. Given that depression is associated with low perceived control, we tested the hypothesis that enhanced attentional focus to context will increase perceived control in people with and without depression. A total of 106 non-depressed and mildly depressed participants completed a no control zero-contingency task with low and high outcome probability conditions. In the experimental context-focus group, participants were instructed to attend to the context, whereas in the control group, participants were instructed to attend to their thoughts. Irrespective of attentional focus, non-depressed participants displayed illusory control. However, people with mild depression responded strongly to the attention focus manipulation. In the control group, they evidenced low perceived control with classic depressive realism effects. In the experimental group, when asked to focus on the context in which events took place, participants with mild depression displayed enhanced perceived control or illusory control, similar to non-depressed participants. Findings are discussed in relation to whether depression effects on perceived control represent tendencies towards realism or attentional aspects of depressive thoughts.

Keywords:

• Contingency learning
• Perceived control
• Depression
• Depressive realism
• Context
• Attention

ORCID

R. M. Msetfi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6184-3998

Notes

¹A power analysis indicated that a sample of 136 was required for a power of .8 to detect medium sized between-group effects and a sample of 24 to detect repeated measures effects and interactions. However, recruitment for this project was constrained by the time frame required for the submission of a Master's thesis on which this paper is based. Only 106 volunteers kept appointments at the laboratory to participate in the experiment. Therefore, while power to detect the repeated measures effects and interactions that were the focus of our hypotheses was high (.99), power to detect main effects of between-group variables was lower than we planned (.68).