Depression and everyday social interaction.

Examined the relationships between depressive symptoms and everyday social interaction in a nonclinical population. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and social interaction was measured using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. People who were classified as at risk for depression had less rewarding interactions than people who were not at risk. Depressive symptoms and interaction quantity and quality were negatively correlated for participants above the cutpoint, whereas they were uncorrelated for those below the at-risk cutpoint. Results also suggest that, compared with nondepressed people, depressed people derive more rewards from interactions with their closest opposite-sex friends, relative to the rewards they derive from interactions with other opposite-sex friends. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Crying threshold and intensity in major depressive disorder.

Clinical lore suggests that depression is associated with frequent and intense crying. To test these postulations empirically, a standardized cry-evoking stimulus was presented to depressed and nondepressed participants, and their likelihood of crying and the magnitude of crying-related changes in their emotion experience, behavior, and autonomic physiology were compared. Unexpectedly, crying was no more likely in depressed than in nondepressed participants. Within the nondepressed group, participants who cried exhibited increases in the report and display of sadness and had greater cardiac and electrodermal activation than did participants who did not cry. There was less evidence of this crying-related emotional activation within the depressed group. The lack of emotional activation among clinically depressed participants who cried provides a tantalizing clue concerning how emotions are dysregulated in this disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactions of depressed college students with their roommates: Not necessarily negative.

Coyne's (1976b) interactional theory of the social environment's role in maintaining depression suggests that depressed people create negative affect in others. This leads to a pattern of interactions between depressed individuals and others that is aversive to both parties and becomes a vicious circle. We examined interactions of 15 depressed and 15 nondepressed college students with their roommates. On questionnaires, roommates did indicate more rejection, dislike, and avoidance of the depressed students than of the nondepressed students, consistent with Coyne's theory, and depressed-student–roommate interactions were more personally involved (higher percentage of self-disclosure) and less positive than nondepressed-student–roommate interactions. The moods of both depressed students and their roommates were worse than those of controls before the interaction but, contrary to expectation, improved over the course of the interaction, whereas the moods of nondepressed students and their roommates did not change significantly. Implications of these results for Coyne's theory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Responses to depressed individuals: Discrepancies between self-report and observer-rated behavior.

Examined the behavior, mood, and perceptions of 40 nondepressed female undergraduates (Ss) interacting with 20 depressed and 20 nondepressed female undergraduates (targets). Ss tried to get to know the targets and then completed questionnaires including the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List. Following the interaction, Ss who spoke with depressed targets did not differ from Ss who interacted with nondepressed targets with respect to either self-reported mood or willingness to engage in further contact with their partners. However, Ss who interacted with depressed targets smiled less often, demonstrated less arousal and pleasantness in their facial expressions, exhibited less positive and more negative content in their conversations, and made fewer statements of direct support to the targets. Depressed targets offered fewer statements of direct support to their partners and talked about more negative content in their interactions. (26 ref) (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)     

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)     

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)     

Clinician's reactions to depressive behavior and ill health.

Psychotherapists are susceptible to prevailing negative stereotypes that exist in society at large. Inappropriate negative attitudes toward depressed and ill patients can adversely affect interactions with such clients. The authors examined the reactions of 410 psychologists to vignettes that described a client who emitted either depressed or nondepressed behavior and who varied in terms of cancer prognosis. Clinicians had negative mood reactions after reading the vignette of the depressed client; they also believed the depressed client possessed many undesirable personal attributes. Practicing psychologists are urged to reflect on their attitudes and beliefs so they do not negatively affect assessment and therapy services. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Decision style in depression: The contribution of perceived risks versus benefits.

The present study investigated the contribution of cognitive and social factors to the decision style of depressed persons. During two sessions (Times 1 and 2), depressed and nondepressed college students were asked to imagine themselves making decisions about common life situations that afforded potential benefits but that also entailed potential risks. The decision scenarios varied in content. For each situation, subjects evaluated several potential risks and benefits and indicated what decisions they would make. In both sessions and for all types of decision scenarios, the depressed assigned greater weight to risks than did the nondepressed. Furthermore, for decisions about initiating social contact and establishing intimacy, the depressed expressed a greater reluctance to take the target action than did the nondepressed, and their perceptions of risks appeared to influence their estimated decisions more strongly. The Time 2 study also revealed that most of these differences applied equally when individuals were thinking about themselves or another person. However, risk perceptions were found to contribute more to the decision style of the depressed, relative to the nondepressed, only when their thoughts were focused on themselves and not when their thoughts were focused on another person. (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)     

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)     

Helplessness in children of depressed and nondepressed mothers.

Helpless behaviors in 5- to 7-year-old children of depressed and nondepressed mothers were assessed through direct observation, interviews, and teacher ratings. The affective tone the mothers set in a joint puzzle task and their tendency to encourage mastery or become intrusive when their children became frustrated at the task were also assessed. Although depressed mothers set a more negative affective tone than nondepressed mothers during solvable puzzles, there were few significant differences between the 2 groups of mothers and children. Still, mothers who were more negative and hostile and less able to encourage mastery in their children had children who exhibited more helpless behaviors in the puzzle task, who were less likely to endorse active problem-solving approaches to frustrating situations, and whose teachers rated the children as less competent and more prone to helpless behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Performance benefits of depression: Sequential decision making in a healthy sample and a clinically depressed sample.

Previous research reported conflicting results concerning the influence of depression on cognitive task performance. Whereas some studies reported that depression enhances performance, other studies reported negative or null effects. These discrepant findings appear to result from task variation, as well as the severity and treatment status of participant depression. To better understand these moderating factors, we study the performance of individuals—in a complex sequential decision task similar to the secretary problem—who are nondepressed, depressed, and recovering from a major depressive episode. We find that depressed individuals perform better than do nondepressed individuals. Formal modeling of participants' decision strategies suggested that acutely depressed participants had higher thresholds for accepting options and made better choices than either healthy participants or those recovering from depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal consequences of depression: Responses to men and women enacting a depressed role.

To investigate interpersonal consequences of depressed behavior, telephone interactions were conducted between same- and opposite-sex pairs of 62 male and 64 female undergraduates. In each pair, one person enacted a depressed or nondepressed role. The content of the 2 roles differed only in the presence or absence of characteristically depressive affect and attitudes. Ratings of interest in further contact, personal rejection, and perceived impairment of role functioning all revealed a similar pattern: Depressed persons were more strongly rejected than nondepressed persons, especially by persons of the opposite sex. Interactions with depressed persons elicited significantly more depression in the listener than did interactions with nondepressed persons. Moreover, significantly more feminine traits were attributed to depressed than nondepressed persons. The responses of others to depressed individuals are discussed with respect to their implications for conceptualizing and treating depression. The results also have implications for the understanding of sex differences in the epidemiology of depression. (24 ref) (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)     

Depression, self-focused attention, and expectancies for positive and negative future life events for self and others.

In two studies, we examined depressed and nondepressed persons' judgments of the probability of future positive and negative life events occurring to themselves and to others. Study 1 demonstrated that depressed subjects were generally less optimistic than their nondepressed counterparts: Although nondepressed subjects rated positive events as more likely to happen to themselves than negative events, depressed subjects did not. In addition, relative to nondepressed subjects, depressed subjects rated positive events as less likely to occur to themselves and more likely to occur to others and negative events as more likely to occur to both self and others. Study 2 investigated the role that differential levels of self-focused attention might play in mediating these differences. On the basis of prior findings that depressed persons generally engage in higher levels of self-focus than nondepressed persons do and the notion that self-focus activates one's self-schema, we hypothesized that inducing depressed subjects to focus externally would attenuate their pessimistic tendencies. Data from Study 2 supported the hypothesis that high levels of self-focus partially mediate depressive pessimism: Whereas self-focused depressed subjects were more pessimistic than nondepressed subjects, externally focused depressed subjects were not. The role of attentional focus in maintaining these and other depressive pessimistic tendencies was discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and marital functioning: An examination of specificity and gender differences.

Recent work has emphasized the importance of assessing the marital relationships of depressed persons. The present study was designed to examine the specificity to clinical depression of problematic marital functioning and to assess potential gender differences in the marital relationships and spousal interactions of depressed persons. Depressed psychiatric patients, nondepressed medical patients, and nondepressed community control subjects and their spouses completed measures of marital satisfaction and then participated in a 20-min marital interaction task. Subjects then completed measures assessing their postinteraction mood and perceptions of their spouses, and the interactions were scored with respect to the frequency of occurrence of a number of behaviors. The depressed couples differed from the community controls on virtually every measure of marital functioning. Furthermore, although the medical patients and their spouses also reported marital dissatisfaction and exhibited dysfunctional interactional behavior, only the depressed couples were characterized by negative affect following the interactions and by negative appraisals of their spouses' behaviors. This negative affect was particularly pronounced for the depressed women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Marital interactions of depressed men and women.

This article examined marital interactions in 50 couples with a depressed husband, 41 couples with a depressed wife, and 50 nondepressed control couples. As expected, couples with a depressed partner evidenced more disturbed marital interaction than control couples. Furthermore, couples with a depressed wife demonstrated less positive communication than couples with a depressed husband, notwithstanding the fact the depressed husbands exhibited greater depression severity than depressed wives. Findings are integrated with recent research on gender differences in affective expression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and pessimism for the future: Biased use of statistically relevant information in predictions for self versus others.

The cognitive theories of depression emphasize the role of pessimism about the future in the etiology and maintenance of depression. The present research was designed for two reasons: (a) to provide a clear demonstration that depressed individuals' predictions of the likelihood of future outcomes are more pessimistic than those of nondepressed individuals given identical information with which to make forecasts and identical conditions for forecasting, and (b) to test two additional hypotheses regarding possible mechanisms underlying depressives' relative pessimism in forecasting: a social-comparison and a differential attributional-style hypothesis. We used a modification of the cue-use paradigm developed by Ajzen (1977, Experiment 1) and examined depressed and nondepressed people's predictions of the likelihood of future positive and negative outcomes for themselves and for others. The results provided strong support for pessimism on the part of depressed individuals relative to nondepressed individuals in forecasts for both self and others. In addition, whereas nondepressives exhibited a self-enhancing bias in which they overestimated their probability of success and underestimated their probability of failure relative to that of similar others, depressives did not succumb to either positive or negative social comparison biases in prediction. Finally, in line with the attributional-style hypothesis, depressed–nondepressed differences in subjects' cue-use patterns were obtained, especially in forecasts for self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)