Depressive realism is a term used to describe the hypothesis that depressed individuals can assess their control, performance, and outcomes in a more accurate manner than those who are not depressed. The phenomenon suggests that, contrary to common beliefs about depression warping reality, these individuals may not overestimate their influence or capabilities, which contributes to a more realistic outlook.
The concept of depressive realism was first introduced by psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson in the late 1970s. Their article laid the foundation for understanding how depression affects an individual’s perception of accuracy.
The researchers conducted a series of experiments where they found that depressed participants made more realistic judgments about an event when compared to their non-depressed counterparts, illustrating what has become known as depressive realism.
Depression and Cognitive Biases
Depression often involves a cognitive distortion, where individuals may perceive their environment and experiences in a systematically skewed manner. The notion of bias in depression centers around the tendency to process information in ways that are congruent with depressive thinking patterns.
This can manifest as a self-fulfilling prophecy or negative bias, where one predominantly focuses on adverse outcomes or interpretations, often ignoring the positive aspects of a situation. Such a perspective may lead to an illusion of control, a belief that one has less influence over events than is actually the case, further exacerbating feelings of helplessness and hopelessness commonly experienced in depression.
Positive vs. Negative Biases
Positive biases include the illusory superiority bias and the false uniqueness effect. Such positive illusions about one’s abilities or optimism about future outcomes can sometimes counteract the effects of depression.
These may help preserve self-esteem and provide motivation. However, positive bias can also result in an unrealistic assessment of situations, potentially leading to disappointment or failure when expectations are not met.
The balance between these biases is delicate; too much emphasis on either side may distort an individual’s judgment and decision-making:
Negative Bias
- Focus: Undue emphasis on negative aspects.
- Risk: Reinforcement of depressive symptoms.
Positive Bias
- Focus: Overestimation of positive outcomes or personal control.
- Risk: Potential for disillusionment.
Judgment and Reality
Research investigating judgment and reality within the context of depressive realism suggests that depressed people are more aligned with the reality of their situation than their non-depressed counterparts. Studies typically involve assessing how people with varying levels of depression make predictions about their control and influence in different scenarios.
One of the seminal research works argues that people who are mildly depressed often possess a more accurate judgment of their actual control in lab-based tasks, underscoring an intriguing link between depressive states and a less biased perception of reality. In terms of external validity, these findings pave the way for a more nuanced understanding of depressive cognition in everyday settings.
Clinical Implications and Treatment
Depressive realism, while still a subject of academic and clinical debate, carries notable implications for the diagnosis and treatment of depression. It challenges practitioners to consider the nuanced ways in which perception may be affected by depressive symptoms and tailor treatment approaches accordingly.
Individuals with depressive realism often demonstrate a nuanced self-report of their abilities. They tend to underestimate their own competencies and expect less success compared to non-depressed individuals, who typically overestimate their abilities. This can be particularly seen in their assessment of tasks where their low self-esteem aligns with a more accurate picture of their likely performance.
The potential validity of depressive realism hints that cognitive therapy approaches, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), should account for individual differences in perception and cognition.
Cognitive Therapy:
- Objective Assessment: Clinicians incorporate an unbiased assessment of the individual’s perceptions versus actual circumstances
- Cognitive Reappraisal: Treatment may focus on helping individuals reframe thoughts in a balanced manner, neither overly negative nor unrealistically positive
CBT and Tailored Interventions:
- Cognitive Distortions: CBT targets cognitive distortions that contribute to depression, while acknowledging areas where the individual’s perceptions may be accurate.
- Behavioral Activation: By encouraging engagement in activities, therapy aims to improve mood and adjust potentially accurate yet maladaptive perceptions.
Depressive Realism Criticisms and Evidence
In support of the effect, a 1979 study from Alloy and Abramson found that when participants were asked to press a button and rate their perceived control over whether or not a light turned on, depressed people rated their control more accurately than non-depressed people. Another of their studies found that when participants were asked to complete a task and rate their performance without receiving feedback, depressed people made more accurate self-ratings than non-depressed people.
Depressed participants in another study were more likely to give an accurate self-rating after completing a series of tasks, receiving feedback on their performance after each task, and self-rating their overall performance after completing all of the tasks than non-depressed people. Similarly, when asked to evaluate their performance both immediately and some time after completing a task, depressed individuals made accurate appraisals both immediately before and after time had passed.
A 2012 fmri study from Eva-Maria Seidel and colleagues showed depressed patients to be more accurate in their causal attributions of positive and negative social events than non-depressed participants, who demonstrated a positive bias. This difference was reflected in the differential activation of the fronto-temporal network, higher activation for non-self-serving attributions in non-depressed participants and self-serving attributions in depressed patients, and reduced coupling of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex seed region and the limbic areas when depressed patients made self-serving attributions.
Contrary Evidence
Critics of the concept can also point to research that backs up their position. For example, when asked to judge their own performance as well as the performance of others, non-depressed people showed a positive bias when judging themselves but no prejudice when rating others. Depressed people, on the other hand, showed no prejudice when rating themselves but a positive bias when rating others.
When asked to rate their performance immediately after a task and after some time had passed, depressed people were more accurate immediately after the task but more negative after some time had passed, whereas non-depressed people were positive immediately after and some time later.
A 1991 study from Dunning and Story suggested that in real-world settings, depressed individuals are actually less accurate and more overconfident in their predictions than their non-depressed peers. Participants’ attributional accuracy may also be related to their overall attributional style rather than the presence and severity of their depressive symptoms.
Some have argued that studies supporting depressive realism are narrowly designed and may not account for the complexities of everyday decision-making and perception. Additionally, there are concerns about the representativeness of study samples, suggesting that findings might not be applicable to the wider population.
Another key critique is the interpretation of accuracy. While proponents of depressive realism suggest that depressed individuals make more accurate assessments, some researchers counter that such assessments are context-dependent and can be overly negative, leading to interpretations that may not be more reflective of reality, but rather a different bias.
Failure to Replicate
Depressive realism is based on a 1979 study of college students who were asked to anticipate how much control they had over whether a light went green when they pushed a button. The original study indicated that depressed students were better at recognizing when they had no influence over the lights, whereas non-depressed students tended to overestimate their amount of control.
In 2022, Professor Don Moore, of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business set out along with his colleagues to try to replicate those findings as part of a broader effort to restore trust in scientific research, much of which is woven into the fabric of the scientific community and wider culture. According to Google Scholar, the original study was cited over 2,000 times in subsequent studies or research.
Moore’s team studied two groups of participants, whom they screened for depression via a questionnaire. The first group of 248 people came from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online business that pays survey takers and study participants from a variety of backgrounds, in this instance everyone over the age of 18. The second group consisted of 134 college students who took part in exchange for college credit.
The researchers added or used more modern and robust measurements for the study. For example, they added a mechanism to measure bias, and experimentally varied the amount of control participants actually had.
Participants completed a task comparable to the one used in the 1979 study. In 40 rounds, each player decided whether to hit a button, which resulted in the appearance of a lightbulb or a black box.
Each was instructed to determine if pressing (or not pressing) the button affected whether or not the light turned on. Following the rounds, each participant reported how much control they had over the light.
Both the online groups and college student groups were split into three experimental conditions. Each condition experienced different relationships between the button and the light during the 40 rounds.
Participants in the first two situations had no influence over the presence of the light, but it illuminated one-quarter or three-quarters of the time. The third condition gave participants some control, as they saw the light three-quarters of the time after pressing the button.
The researchers were unable to replicate the results of the original study. In fact, persons with higher levels of sadness in the online group underestimated their control, which contradicted the original study. The researchers speculate that this discovery could be due to anxiety rather than depression, which Moore believes warrants more investigation.
In the college student group, depression levels had little impact on their view of their control, the authors found. Researchers also tested for overconfidence.
Study participants were asked to estimate their scores on an intelligence test. Depression had no impact there, either.
The results, Moore says, undermined his belief in depressive realism. The study does not suggest that there are benefits to being depressed, so no one should seek depression as a cure to their cognitive biases, Moore noted.
Consider a manager hiring someone who is depressed because, according to the original study, the person is less likely to be overconfident and will have superior judgment. Moore believes that would be a mistake.
While depression does not improve judgment, Moore believes that the difficulty of appropriately gauging our amount of control in diverse situations has broader ramifications throughout life.
References:
- Alloy, L.B.; Abramson, L.Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 108 (4): 441–485. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441
- Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1988). Depressive realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L. B. Alloy (Ed.), Cognitive processes in depression (pp. 223–265). The Guilford Press
- DeMonbreun, B.G.; Craighead, W.E. (1977). Distortion of perception and recall of positive and neutral feedback in depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 1 (4): 311–329. doi:10.1007/bf01663996
- Dev, Amelia & Moore, Don & Johnson, Sheri & Garrett, Karin. (2022). Sadder ≠ Wiser: Depressive Realism Is Not Robust to Replication. Collabra: Psychology. 8. 10.1525/collabra.38529
- Dunning D, Story AL (1991). Depression, realism, and the overconfidence effect: are the sadder wiser when predicting future actions and events? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 61 (4): 521–532. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.61.4.521
- Gotlib, I.H.; Meltzer, S.J. (1987). Depression and the perception of social skill in dyadic interaction. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 11: 41–54. doi:10.1007/bf01183131
- Michael Thomas Moore; David Fresco (2007). Depressive realism and attributional style: implications for individuals at risk for depression. Behavior Therapy. 38 (2): 144–154. doi:10.1016/j.beth.2006.06.003
- Michael Thomas Moore; David Fresco (2012). Depressive Realism: A Meta-Analytic Review. Clinical Psychology Review. 32 (1): 496–509. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2012.05.004
- Nelson, R.E.; Craighead, W.E. (1977). Selective recall of positive and negative feedback, self-control behaviors and depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 86 (4): 379–388. doi:10.1037/0021-843x.86.4.379
- Pyszczynski, T.; Holt, K.; Greenberg, J. (1987). Depression, self-focused attention, and expectancies for positive and negative future life events for self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 52 (5): 994–1001. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.5.994
- Taylor, Shelley E.; Armor, David A. (December 1996). Positive Illusions and Coping with Adversity. Journal of Personality. 64 (4): 873–898. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1996.tb00947.x