Department of Psychology, Fisk University, USA.
Behav Res Ther. 2010 Apr;48(4):257-65. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2009.11.011. Epub 2009 Nov 26.
Depressive realism suggests that depressed individuals make more accurate judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts. However, most studies demonstrating this phenomenon were conducted in nonclinical samples. In this study, psychiatric patients who met criteria for major depressive disorder underestimated control in a contingent situation and were consistently more negative in their judgments than were nondepressed controls. Depressed patients were less likely than their nondepressed counterparts to overestimate control in a noncontingent situation, but largely because they perceived receiving less reinforcement. Depressed patients were no more likely to use the appropriate logical heuristic to generate their judgments of control than their nondepressed counterparts and each appeared to rely on different primitive heuristics. Depressed patients were consistently more negative than their nondepressed counterparts and when they did appear to be more "accurate" in their judgments of control (as in the noncontingent situation) it was largely because they applied the wrong heuristic to less accurate information. These findings do not support the notion of depressive realism and suggest that depressed patients distort their judgments in a characteristically negative fashion.
抑郁现实主义认为，抑郁个体比非抑郁个体更能准确地判断控制感。然而，大多数证明这一现象的研究都是在非临床样本中进行的。在这项研究中，符合重性抑郁障碍标准的精神病患者在有条件的情况下低估了控制感，而且他们的判断比非抑郁对照组更为消极。与非抑郁对照组相比，抑郁患者不太可能在非条件情况下高估控制感，但主要是因为他们认为自己得到的强化较少。抑郁患者在生成控制感判断时，使用适当逻辑启发式的可能性并不比非抑郁对照组高，而且他们似乎各自依赖于不同的原始启发式。抑郁患者的判断比非抑郁对照组更为消极，而且当他们的控制感判断似乎更为“准确”时（如在非条件情况下），主要是因为他们将错误的启发式应用于不太准确的信息。这些发现不支持抑郁现实主义的观点，表明抑郁患者以一种典型的消极方式扭曲了他们的判断。
