Belmans Eline, Raes Filip, Vervliet Bram, Takano Keisuke
Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2023 Feb;232:103823. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103823. Epub 2022 Dec 26.
Learning theories of depression propose that negative thinking is acquired through subsequent rewarding experiences and is often resistant to change even when it becomes associated with punishment. We examined whether this persistency of negative thinking is related to current and future levels of depressive symptoms among adolescents. Persistency of negative self-referent thinking was assessed by means of a decision-making task, namely the emotional reversal learning task. This task offers participants the choice between thinking about negative and positive self-related aspects. Their choice for negative self-referent thinking is initially rewarded but is later punished. Therefore, participants were expected to efficiently switch between negative and positive self-referent thinking, and to internally update their reward expectancy for these thinking options. Results showed that persistency of negative self-referent thinking was related to concurrent levels of depressive symptoms, replicating earlier findings in adults. However, persistency of negative thinking was unrelated to future levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that adolescents with depressive symptoms tend to hold on to the belief that negative self-referent thinking has beneficial consequences, even when it is no longer being rewarded. This tendency should be seen as a concurrent feature of depression, as the predictive value is still in question.
抑郁症的学习理论提出，消极思维是通过随后的奖励经历习得的，即使与惩罚相关联，也往往难以改变。我们研究了这种消极思维的持续性是否与青少年当前和未来的抑郁症状水平有关。通过一项决策任务，即情绪反转学习任务，评估消极自我参照思维的持续性。这项任务让参与者在思考消极和积极的自我相关方面之间做出选择。他们选择消极自我参照思维最初会得到奖励，但后来会受到惩罚。因此，预计参与者能够在消极和积极自我参照思维之间有效切换，并在内心更新对这些思维选项的奖励预期。结果表明，消极自我参照思维的持续性与当前抑郁症状水平相关，这重复了早期在成年人中的研究结果。然而，消极思维的持续性与未来抑郁症状水平无关。这些发现表明，有抑郁症状的青少年倾向于坚持这样的信念，即消极自我参照思维有有益的后果，即使它不再得到奖励。这种倾向应被视为抑郁症的一个当前特征，因为其预测价值仍存在疑问。
