Depression and self-reinforcement in a public and a private setting.

Three groups of subjects--depressed, nondepressed, and nondepressed pretreated with an insolvable-problems (failure) manipulation--were compared on self-reinforcement during a 22-trial skill task. Success rate was experimentally controlled, and all subjects received either an initially high rate of success followed by a low rate of success or an initially low rate of success followed by a high rate of success. Subjects responded in either a public (experimenter present) or a private (unobserved and anonymous) condition. Measures of self-reinforcement revealed differences among the groups' responses across the public-private conditions, suggesting greater support for predictions derived from an interpersonal view of depression than for predictions from current cognitive theories of depression. Moreover, it was found that within the high-low sequence depressed-private subjects reinforced themselves at a significantly higher level than nondepressed-private subjects, a finding at odds with predictions derived from cognitive theories.