Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Oct 14;15(10):e0239714. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239714. eCollection 2020.
The general public is increasingly aware of the role of genes in causing depression. Recent studies have begun uncovering unintended negative consequences of learning about a person's genetic susceptibility to disorders. Because people tend to believe that genes determine one's identity, having genes related to a disorder can be misinterpreted as equivalent to having the disorder. Consequently, learning that a person is genetically predisposed to depression can make people misremember mild depression as more severe. Participants across three experiments read a target vignette about a character displaying mild depressive symptoms, while descriptions of the character's genetic susceptibility to depression were experimentally manipulated. Participants then read a foil vignette describing a character with more severe depressive symptoms. Afterwards, participants who had learned that the target character was genetically predisposed to depression were comparatively more likely to misremember the target symptoms as being severe, when in fact they were mild. This pattern of results was obtained among both laypeople (Experiments 1 and 2) and practicing master's-level, but not doctoral-level, mental health clinicians (Experiment 3). Given that depression is diagnosed primarily based on a person's memory of depressive symptoms, the current findings suggest that genetic information about depression may lead to over-diagnosis of depression.
公众越来越意识到基因在导致抑郁症方面的作用。最近的研究开始揭示了解一个人对疾病遗传易感性的学习所带来的意想不到的负面影响。由于人们倾向于认为基因决定一个人的身份，因此与疾病相关的基因可能被误解为等同于患有该疾病。因此，得知一个人易患抑郁症会使人们错误地将轻度抑郁症记忆为更严重的抑郁症。在三个实验中，参与者阅读了一个关于一个表现出轻度抑郁症状的角色的目标小插曲，同时对角色易患抑郁症的遗传易感性的描述进行了实验操纵。参与者随后阅读了一个描述一个有更严重抑郁症状的角色的箔片小插曲。之后，那些得知目标角色易患抑郁症的参与者更有可能错误地将目标症状记忆为严重，而实际上它们是轻度的。在普通民众（实验 1 和实验 2）和实践硕士水平但不是博士水平的心理健康临床医生（实验 3）中都获得了这种结果模式。鉴于抑郁症主要是根据一个人对抑郁症状的记忆来诊断的，目前的研究结果表明，关于抑郁症的遗传信息可能导致对抑郁症的过度诊断。
