Depression and emotional reactivity: Variation among Asian Americans of East Asian descent and European Americans.

Studies of Western samples (e.g., European Americans [EAs]) suggest that depressed individuals tend to show diminished emotional reactivity (J. G. Gehricke & A. J. Fridlund, 2002; G. E. Schwartz, P. L. Fair, P. Salt, M. R. Mandel, & G. L. Klerman, 1976a, 1976b). Do these findings generalize to individuals oriented to other cultures (e.g., East Asian cultures)? The authors compared the emotional reactions (i.e., reports of emotional experience, facial behavior, and physiological reactivity) of depressed and nondepressed EAs and Asian Americans of East Asian descent (AAs) to sad and amusing films. Their results were consistent with previous findings: Depressed EAs showed a pattern of diminished reactivity to the sad film (less crying, less intense reports of sadness) compared with nondepressed participants. In contrast, depressed AAs showed a pattern of heightened emotional reactivity (greater crying) compared with nondepressed participants. Across cultural groups, depressed and nondepressed participants did not differ in their reports of amusement or facial behavior during the amusing film. Physiological reactivity to the film clips did not differ between depressed and control participants for either cultural group. Thus, although depression may influence particular aspects of emotional reactivity across cultures (e.g., crying), the specific direction of this influence may depend on prevailing cultural norms regarding emotional expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Terror management and meaning: evidence that the opportunity to defend the worldview in response to mortality salience increases the meaningfulness of life in the mildly depressed

Previous terror management research has demonstrated that mildly depressed participants show a greater increase in worldview defense in response to reminders of their mortality than do nondepressed participants. Because the cultural worldview is posited to provide a meaningful conception of life, we hypothesized that mildly depressed participants who defend their worldview in response to mortality salience (MS) would increase their perception that the world is meaningful. A preliminary study first examined the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale as a measure to assess perceptions of meaning. In the primary study, mildly depressed and nondepressed participants contemplated their own mortality or a neutral topic, evaluated two targets in a manner that either allowed them to defend their worldview or that did not, and then completed the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale. As predicted, mildly depressed participants who had the opportunity to defend their worldview in response to mortality salience reported greater meaning in life than did mildly depressed participants who did not have the opportunity to defend their worldview, or mildly depressed participants not exposed to mortality salience. Implications for understanding and treating depression are briefly discussed.     

Sadness and amusement reactivity differentially predict concurrent and prospective functioning in major depressive disorder.

Depressed individuals often fail to react to emotionally significant stimuli. The significance of this pattern of emotional dysregulation in depression is poorly understood. In the present study, depressed and nondepressed participants viewed standardized neutral, sad, fear, and amusing films; and experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses to each film were assessed. Compared with nondepressed controls, depressed participants reported sadness and amusement in a flattened, context-insensitive manner. Those depressed participants who reported the least reactivity to the sad film exhibited the greatest concurrent impairment. Prospectively, the depressed participant who exhibited the least behavioral and heart rate reactivity to the amusing film were the least likely to recover from depression. Loss of the context-appropriate modulation of emotion in depression may reflect a core feature of emotion dysregulation in this disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and marital interaction: Concordance between intent and perception of communication.

This study was designed to examine the perceptions and recall of interpersonal communications in marital dyads with a clinically depressed spouse. Nine depressed and 10 nondepressed psychiatric outpatients and 10 nondepressed nonpsychiatric controls interacted with their spouses, both partners simultaneously coding as positive, neutral, or negative both the intended impact of their own communications and the perceived impact of their spouses' messages. Using videotapes of the interactions, observers also coded each message. Analyses suggested that compared with nondepressed subjects, depressed patients have a negative perception of their environment. Although the depressed patients intended and perceived a lower percentage of positive messages and a higher percentage of negative messages, their recall of their coding was accurate. In addition, although they coded and estimated lower concordance than did subjects in the two nondepressed groups, they tended to overestimate their concordance, as did all of the other participants. The observers' coding did not discriminate between groups but was more negative than the participants' self- or the spouse-ratings. Implications of these results both for theories of depression and for approaches to treatment are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Diminished response to pleasant stimuli by depressed women.

This study examined the self-report and facial expressions of emotional response to pictorial stimuli and the incidental learning of pleasant and unpleasant words by depressed (n?=?20) and nondepressed (n?=?20) women. Depression was associated with reports of diminished emotional response and reduced frequency and intensity of facial expressions only to pleasant stimuli. The 2 groups did not differ in response to hedonically unpleasant stimuli, even those specifically relevant to the emotion of sadness. In a similar vein, depressed and nondepressed participants showed differences in incidental recall for only pleasant self-referential terms. There was no difference in recall of unpleasant words. These findings suggest the importance of hedonic deficits on psychological processes in clinical depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The chronometry of affective startle modulation in unipolar depression.

Affective startle eyeblink modulation by unipolar depressed and nondepressed participants was assessed during the anticipation and viewing of emotional pictures. Anticipatory startle probes were presented at 2,000 ms and 750 ms before picture onset. Startle probes during picture viewing were presented at 300 ms and 3,500-4,500 ms after picture onset. Although nondepressed participants demonstrated the predicted quadratic and linear patterns of responding in the 2,000-ms anticipatory and 3,500-4,500-ms viewing conditions, respectively, depressed participants were not significantly responsive to differences among picture valence categories at these probe conditions. There were no between-groups differences in startle modulation at the other two probe intervals, in picture ratings, or in behavioral responses to pictures. There was also little evidence of hyperresponsivity to negatively valenced stimuli in the depressed group. These results indicate that depression-related affective hyporesponsivity extended to startle modulation but that the nature and magnitude of the differences between depressed and nondepressed individuals were conditional on the specific cognitive and motivational processes recruited at different points in time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression.

Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, respectively, active in WM. Compared with controls, depressed participants were both slower to disengage from sad stimuli and faster to disengage from happy facial expressions. In contrast, nondepressed controls took longer to disengage from happy stimuli than from neutral or sad stimuli. These group differences in reaction times may reflect both protective and maladaptive biases in WM that underlie the ability to effectively regulate negative affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Clinical depression and day-to-day social interaction in a community sample.

Adult participants recruited from the community, one half of whom met criteria for clinical depression, described their day-to-day social interactions using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. Compared with the nondepressed participants, depressed participants found their interactions to be less enjoyable and less intimate, and they felt less influence over their interactions. Differences between the two groups in intimacy occurred only in interactions with close relations and not in interactions with nonintimates, and differences in influence were more pronounced for those who were cohabiting than for those who were not. There were no differences in how socially active depressed and nondepressed people were or in the amount of contact they had with different relational partners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remembering the Good, Forgetting the Bad: Intentional Forgetting of Emotional Material in Depression.

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a clear practice effect. However, forgetting came at a cost: Compared with the nondepressed participants and with the depressed participants who were instructed to forget positive words, depressed participants who were instructed to forget negative words showed significantly worse recall of the baseline words. These results indicate that training depressed individuals in intentional forgetting could prove to be an effective strategy to counteract automatic ruminative tendencies and mood-congruent biases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression, interpersonal standard setting, and judgments of self-efficacy.

Investigated the relationship between standard setting and judgments of self-efficacy in the domain of interpersonal functioning for depressed and nondepressed Ss. Consistent with a self-control model of depression, a large discrepancy between personal standards and judgments of personal efficacy for performance was postulated to be related to depression. Undergraduate students who scored above 13 on 2 administrations of the Beck Depression Inventory composed the depressed group. 39 depressed and 39 nondepressed students rated their minimal standards for adequate interpersonal performance, its importance to them, and their judgments of self-efficacy for the same tasks, using the Interpersonal Concerns Questionnaire. Depressed Ss showed a larger discrepancy between strength of interpersonal standards and strength of self-efficacy than did normal Ss. Depressed Ss expressed a lower strength of self-efficacy than did nondepressed Ss, but they did not differ on their interpersonal standards. Importance and the strength for standards are consistent with recent extensions of P. M. Lewinsohn's (1974) model of depression, which suggests that disruptions in self-evaluation are related to lowered judgments of self-efficacy for depressed Ss. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal betrayal and cooperation: Effects on self-evaluation in depression.

Assessed the effect of interpersonal betrayal and cooperative social interaction on self-evaluation processes among 54 female undergraduates scored as depressed or nondepressed on the Self-Rating Depression Scale. Depressed Ss who experienced interpersonal betrayal in a prisoner's dilemma game were more critical of their performance on a subsequent task than were nondepressed Ss or depressed Ss who had experienced a cooperative interaction. Depressed Ss in the betrayal condition also behaved more aggressively toward their betraying partner than did nondepressed betrayed Ss. Depressed Ss were more critical of their own personality characteristics than were nondepressed Ss, regardless of condition. Results suggest that some negative cognitive schema among depressed persons may be altered by interpersonal factors, although it is not clear whether such effects are secondary to increases in self-criticism after conflict or to decreases in self-critical tendencies after positive interaction. Researchers are urged to use multiple, diverse measures of self-evaluation in future efforts to study variability in self-appraisal. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Behavioral activation and inhibition systems and the severity and course of depression.

Theorists have proposed that depression is associated with abnormalities in the behavioral activation (BAS) and behavioral inhibition (BIS) systems. In particular, depressed individuals are hypothesized to exhibit deficient BAS and overactive BIS functioning. Self-reported levels of BAS and BIS were examined in 62 depressed participants and 27 nondepressed controls. Clinical functioning was assessed at intake and at 8-month follow-up. Relative to nondepressed controls, depressed participants reported lower BAS levels and higher BIS levels. Within the depressed group, lower BAS levels were associated with greater concurrent depression severity and predicted worse 8-month outcome. Levels of both BIS and BAS showed considerable stability over time and clinical state. Overall, results suggest that BAS dysregulation exacerbates the presentation and course of depressive illness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and the response of others: A re-evaluation.

Used a methodology similar to that employed by J. C. Coyne (see record 1976-22455-001) to determine whether depressed patients induce negative mood in others and elicit social rejection. 45 female undergraduates conversed for 20 min by telephone with either 15 depressed psychiatric women, 15 nondepressed psychiatric women, or 15 nondepressed women. Depression was assessed by the Self-Rating Depression Scale, and Ss were rated on the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia. It was hypothesized that Ss who spoke with depressed Ss would report more negative mood (as assessed by the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List) and less willingness to interact further with their telephone partner than would Ss who spoke with nondepressed Ss. Results show that Ss were able to detect greater sadness and more problems in depressed Ss, although they themselves were not more depressed or more rejecting if they spoke with a depressed S. Present findings did not confirm those of Coyne. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguishing depressed from nondepressed individuals using energy and psychosocial variables.

This study was conducted to determine whether energy level can be used to distinguish depressed from nondepressed individuals and to assess the relative importance of energy level and psychosocial variables in making this distinction. Fifty-seven participants experiencing a current episode of major depression and a matched sample of nondepressed participants completed a self-report questionnaire containing measures of energy level and psychosocial variables. Discriminant analysis revealed that energy level correctly classified 93% as depressed or nondepressed, whereas psychosocial variables correctly classified 87%. Combining the energy and psychosocial variables did not increase the accuracy of classification over that achieved by using only the energy measures. The measure of exhaustion provided the greatest relative contribution to the overall discriminant function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Universal versus personal helplessness in depression: Belief in uncontrollability or incompetence?

The learned helplessness model of depression predicts that depressed individuals believe outcomes are more response independent than do nondepressed individuals in a skill situation. The present study assessed whether depressives' cognitive distortions are specific to their belief about their own skilled action or are a result of a general belief in uncontrollability in the world. Changes in expectancies following success and failure in skill and chance tasks were examined in 32 depressed and 32 nondepressed college students who either performed themselves or observed a confederate perform a pair of tasks. In the skill task, depressed Ss showed significantly smaller changes in expectancy than nondepressed Ss when estimating the probability of their own success. In contrast, depressed and nondepressed Ss did not differ when estimating the probability of another person's success on the identical skill task. It is inferred that depressed individuals view themselves as helpless in a skilled situation but do not view the situation itself as uncontrollable. Results are discussed in terms of the reformulated learned helplessness model. (52 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rumination and impaired resource allocation in depression.

Depression is characterized by a range of cognitive deficits that theorists posit are due to the resource capturing properties of rumination. The present study was designed to examine the relation between rumination and resource allocation in depression. Twenty-five depressed and 25 nondepressed participants completed a modified dual-task version of the recency-probes task, which assesses the controlled allocation of cognitive resources by comparing performance across low- and high-interference conditions. In low-interference conditions, participants performed either the recency-probes task or a tracking task, which required participants to track specific stimuli across trials (i.e., no dual-task interference). In the high-interference condition, participants performed both the recency-probes task and the tracking task, which required the controlled allocation of resources to resolve dual-task interference. Depressed participants performed significantly worse than did their nondepressed counterparts in only the high-interference condition; performance of the 2 groups was comparable in the low-interference conditions. Furthermore, the degree to which depressed participants were impaired in the high-interference condition was correlated .74 with rumination. These findings suggest that an association between rumination and impairments in resource allocation underlies the cognitive difficulties experienced by depressed individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of depression on social economic decision making.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 119(3) of Journal of Abnormal Psychology (see record 2010-15289-020). In the article, the last revision received date printed on the final page of the article was incorrect due to an error in the production process. The correct publication dates are as follows: Received April 14, 2009; Revision received November 6, 2009; Accepted November 9, 2009.] Although the role of emotion in social economic decision making has been increasingly recognized, the impact of mood disorders, such as depression, on such decisions has been surprisingly neglected. To address this gap, 15 depressed and 23 nondepressed individuals completed a well-known economic task, in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Although depressed individuals reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair offers, they accepted significantly more of these offers than did controls. A positive relationship was observed in the depressed group, but not in controls, between acceptance rates of unfair offers and resting cardiac vagal control, a physiological index of emotion regulation capacity. The discrepancy between depressed individuals' increased emotional reactions to unfair offers and their decisions to accept more of these offers contrasts with recent findings that negative mood in nondepressed individuals can lead to lower acceptance rates. This suggests distinct biasing processes in depression, which may be related to higher reliance on regulating negative emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences between depressed and nondepressed individuals in the recognition of and response to facial emotional cues.

Investigated the recognition of, and responses to, facial expressions of emotion. Ss were all women and consisted of the following groups: (1) 16 depressed college students, (2) 16 nondepressed college students, (3) 16 depressed psychiatric patients, and (4) 11 nondepressed psychiatric patients. Results suggest that both depressed groups, relative to the nondepressed college group, made more errors in recognizing the facial expressions and reported more freezing or tensing, higher fear and depression reactions, and less comfort with their own emotional reactions to these expressions and a stronger desire to change these reactions. Few differences were found between the depressed psychiatric patients and the psychiatric control Ss. It is concluded that inappropriate reactions to others' emotions may maintain or increase depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Behavior-state matching and synchrony in mother-infant interactions of nondepressed versus depressed dyads.

Behavior-state matching and synchrony in interactions were assessed in 48 depressed and nondepressed mother–infant dyads when the infants were 3 months old. Attentive/affective behavior states were coded for the infants and mothers on a negative to positive scale. The depressed mothers and their infants matched negative behavior states more often and positive behavior states less often than did the nondepressed dyads. The total percentage of time spent in matching behavior states was less for the depressed than for the nondepressed dyads. Cross-spectral analyses of the mothers' and the infants' behavior-state time series suggested only a trend for greater coherence or synchrony in the interactions of the nondepressed dyads. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)