Journal ArticleDOI
Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?
Lauren B. Alloy,Lyn Y. Abramson +1 more
TLDR
In this article, the learned helplessness theory of depression was used to predict the degree of contingency between responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingencies, and the predicted subjective judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments.Abstract:
SUMMARY How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were presented with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Personal helplessness and action control: Analysis of achievement-related cognitions, self-assessments, and performance.
Journal ArticleDOI
Covariation Assessment by Consumers
TL;DR: This article investigated the effect of prior beliefs and information format on consumers' assessment of the relationship between price and quality for four frequently purchased grocery products, and found that consumers' estimates of covariation were relatively accurate and unaffected by the availability of relevant prior beliefs about the nature of the relationships between price/quality for grocery products in general or format manipulations that varied the ease or difficulty of processing the data.
Journal ArticleDOI
Pessimistic self-preoccupation, performance deficits, and depression.
TL;DR: In this paper, a model of cognitive performance deficits shown in depression is proposed, which suggests that such deficits occur as an interaction of expectancy and focus of attention variables, that is, in the presence of both low expectancy of success and high self-focus.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cognitive biases in three prediction tasks: a test of the cognitive model of depression.
Daniel R. Strunk,Abby D. Adler +1 more
TL;DR: There was no evidence that depressive symptoms were associated with greater accuracy in judgments, and results are largely consistent with cognitive models of depression which postulate that depression is associated with pessimistic biases.
Journal ArticleDOI
Accuracy of hospitalized depressed patients' and healthy controls' retrospective symptom reports: an experience sampling study.
Dror Ben-Zeev,Michael A. Young +1 more
TL;DR: It is suggested that for maximum accuracy in the assessment of depressive symptoms, scientists and practitioners should supplement retrospective self-reports with momentary measures, and consider using ambulatory assessment in cognitive behavioral treatments of depression.
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