The University of Manchester and Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre, School of Psychological Sciences, Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit, Manchester, UK.
Psychopathology. 2013;46(1):34-44. doi: 10.1159/000338632. Epub 2012 Aug 7.
One widespread view holds that vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) is linked to overall increases in negative emotionality. In contrast, cognitive attribution theories emphasize the importance of blaming oneself rather than others for negative events. Thus far, the contrasting predictions of these models have not been directly compared. Following the attributional perspective, we tested the hypothesis that people with remitted MDD show no overall bias towards negative emotions, but a selective bias towards self-blaming emotions relative to those emotions associated with blaming others.
We compared a remitted MDD and a control group on a novel experimental test that allowed us to directly compare proneness to specific emotions associated with different types of self-blame (guilt, shame, self-contempt/disgust) and blame of others (other-indignation/anger, other-contempt/disgust) whilst controlling for negative valence and medication status, and excluding comorbidity.
In agreement with our hypothesis, individuals with remitted MDD exhibited an increased self-contempt bias (difference between contempt/disgust towards self and others) but no increased proneness to any other negative emotion or overall increases in perceived negative valence of stimuli. Moreover, the remitted MDD group exhibited reduced contempt/disgust towards others.
Our results corroborate the prediction that vulnerability to MDD is associated with an imbalance of specific self- and other-blaming emotions rather than a general increase in negative emotions. Based on the composition of our sample, we speculate that self-contempt bias may be particularly characteristic of melancholic MDD subtypes and could be useful for stratification of depression in the future.
一种普遍的观点认为，易患重度抑郁症（MDD）与负面情绪的总体增加有关。相比之下，认知归因理论强调了将负面事件归咎于自己而不是他人的重要性。到目前为止，这些模型的对比预测尚未直接比较。根据归因理论，我们检验了这样一个假设，即缓解后的 MDD 患者对负面情绪没有总体偏见，但相对于归咎于他人的情绪，对自我责备的情绪存在选择性偏见。
我们在一项新的实验测试中比较了缓解后的 MDD 组和对照组，该测试使我们能够直接比较与不同类型的自我责备（内疚、羞耻、自我轻视/厌恶）和责备他人（他人愤怒/愤怒、他人轻视/厌恶）相关的特定情绪的易感性，同时控制了负性效价和药物状态，并排除了共病。
与我们的假设一致，缓解后的 MDD 患者表现出自责偏见增加（自我和他人之间的轻视/厌恶差异），但对任何其他负面情绪或感知到的刺激负性效价的总体增加没有增加倾向。此外，缓解后的 MDD 组对他人的轻视/厌恶减少。
我们的结果证实了这样一种预测，即易患 MDD 与特定的自我和他人责备情绪的不平衡有关，而不是负面情绪的总体增加。基于我们样本的组成，我们推测自我轻视偏见可能是忧郁型 MDD 亚型的特征，并且在未来可能对抑郁症的分层有用。
