Depression And Contingency Judgements

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Depression and Contingency Judgements
As mentioned previously research suggests that an individual’s mood can have an effect on their contingency judgements. A study in which a number of experiments were carried out on the effects of mood on perceptions of contingencies concluded that depressed individuals were more accurate with their contingency judgements than non-depressed individuals (Alloy & Abramson, 1979). In this study depressed and non-depressed individuals were asked to judge the level of control they had over an outcome by carrying out an action. There were two conditions in these experiments, both having non-contingent relationships between actions an outcomes but differing in the frequency of the outcome, one condition with a …show more content…
Non-depressed individuals are thought to have high expectations over the level of control they believe they will have which may lead to them displaying an optimistic bias in their judgments of control. Depressed individuals low expectations or expectations of not having any control over the outcome may lead to them making more accurate judgments of non-contingent relationships (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984). Attentional biases may also have an effect on judgments, literature comparing individuals with positive and negative mood found that depressed individuals tended to show reduced attention to positive and increased attention to negative information (Baert, De Raedt, Schacht, & Koster, 2010). In contingency judgment tasks it may be that an individual’s judgment is influenced more by whatever information received the most attention which may lead non-depressed individuals to rate causal relations as higher than they actually are and therefore showing an illusion of control. If this is the case the level of control participants report overall may not be the average level of control the participant had over multiple contingencies but may be influenced by initial biases the individual displays. This suggests that depressed and non-depressed individual …show more content…
A review of the literature has revealed that both depressed and non-depressed participants in studies tended to show an optimistic bias although for depressed individuals this was shown to a smaller degree (Moore & Fresco, 2012). This result is not consistent with depressive realism effects. This review of the literature also suggested that depressive realism effects are stronger in studies which are lower in methodological quality compared to studies which are higher in methodological
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