Alloy L B, Ahrens A H
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1987 Feb;52(2):366-78. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.52.2.366.
The cognitive theories of depression emphasize the role of pessimism about the future in the etiology and maintenance of depression. The present research was designed for two reasons: to provide a clear demonstration that depressed individuals' predictions of the likelihood of future outcomes are more pessimistic than those of nondepressed individuals given identical information with which to make forecasts and identical conditions for forecasting, and to test two additional hypotheses regarding possible mechanisms underlying depressives' relative pessimism in forecasting: a social-comparison and a differential attributional-style hypothesis. We used a modification of the cue-use paradigm developed by Ajzen (1977, Experiment 1) and examined depressed and nondepressed people's predictions of the likelihood of future positive and negative outcomes for themselves and for others. The results provided strong support for pessimism on the part of depressed individuals relative to nondepressed individuals in forecasts for both self and others. In addition, whereas nondepressives exhibited a self-enhancing bias in which they overestimated their probability of success and underestimated their probability of failure relative to that of similar others, depressives did not succumb to either positive or negative social comparison biases in prediction. Finally, in line with the attributional-style hypothesis, depressed-nondepressed differences in subjects' cue-use patterns were obtained, especially in forecasts for self. The findings are discussed with respect to the mechanisms underlying predictive optimism and pessimism and the possible functions and implications of these predictive biases.
抑郁症的认知理论强调对未来的悲观情绪在抑郁症病因及维持过程中的作用。本研究的开展有两个原因：一是要进行明确的论证，即在给定相同的预测信息和相同的预测条件下，与非抑郁个体相比，抑郁个体对未来结果可能性的预测更为悲观；二是要检验另外两个关于抑郁者在预测中相对悲观情绪潜在机制的假设：社会比较假设和归因方式差异假设。我们对阿杰恩（1977年，实验1）开发的线索使用范式进行了修改，研究了抑郁者和非抑郁者对自己及他人未来积极和消极结果可能性的预测。结果有力地支持了抑郁个体相对于非抑郁个体在对自己和他人的预测中表现出悲观情绪这一观点。此外，非抑郁者表现出自我提升偏差，即相对于类似他人，他们高估自己成功的概率而低估自己失败的概率，而抑郁者在预测中并未受到积极或消极社会比较偏差的影响。最后，与归因方式假设一致，研究发现了抑郁者与非抑郁者在线索使用模式上的差异，尤其是在对自己的预测方面。我们将结合预测性乐观和悲观情绪的潜在机制以及这些预测偏差可能的功能和影响来讨论这些研究结果。
