Depressive realism

Numerous empirical findings relevant for self-regulation research can be related to functional self-regulation patterns (proactive and defensive) and a dysfunctional pattern (depressive absence of self-regulation efforts). The first two patterns are in accordance with numerous empirical findings coming from the fields of cognitive, social and educational psychology, including concepts such as promotion vs. prevention focus and mastery or learning mode vs. coping or well-being mode. These patterns can be supplemented with a depressive pattern indicating self-defeating cognitions and strategies, absence of motivation and self-regulatory efforts. The empirical part of this study is focused on self-regulated learning and relationships between cognitive beliefs, motivational beliefs and self-regulation strategies. Croatian upper elementary students (N  =  460; age 11–14 years) participated in this investigation. Self-reports were gathered by self-regulated learning components scale. The factor analysis of self-regulation components supported the theoretical distinction between the proactive and defensive self-regulation patterns. The results were interpreted in the context of previous research findings. Further research needs to address the question of specific self-regulation failures (the depressive pattern) in samples that include larger proportion of poorly adapted and under-achieving students.

Julie Reshe is an anti-positive psychologist and necro-psychotherapist of Ukrainian Gypsy origin. She is a professor at the School of Advanced Studies (SAS) at the University of Tyumen in Siberia, and director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS). Here, she develops the idea that sadness is human destiny.

Seeking the authentic experience is now widely recognised in tourist literature as a fundamental part of the holiday. The posture in recent academic literature is to claim the outbreak of articles around 'authenticity' has little more to add. This perhaps fails to import the developments in the fields beyond the immediately scientifically empirical. Rather than rejecting the concept of the authentic in tourism, a new wider scope is needed: a staged post-authentic. The western tourist is the most developed tourist in their demands and needs: they seek more than sand and sea. But their needs are vast and paradoxically depend on them not being able to be met, at the category level and the experiential level. Thailand continues along the old theme of exotic-ness orientated around the biting instructions of the Ministry of Culture and the reassurances of the Ministry of Tourism in proclaiming a 'real' Thailand as accessible to the tourist. A reevaluation of that on offer is needed.

This course will take a moderate pessimistic approach considering such negative aspects of life as trauma, anxiety, stress, and depression as not only inevitable but also constitutive parts of human existence. Those concepts will be assessed from the perspective of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, biology, and cognitive neuroscience. The course will employ a critical stance to all of the mentioned disciplinary approaches and will incentive students to engage in critical discussion of the topics analyzed along the course. Students will be expected to be active participants in the creation of the course content. The course will also preserve the potential space for a moderate optimistic approach, the practical side of the course will involve testing and analysis of different therapy practices that deal with negative aspects of life, from CBT treatment and neuropsychology to philosophical counseling and psychodynamic group therapy.

Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we propose that the realism of depressed individuals is caused not by an increased accuracy in perception, but by their more comprehensive exposure to the actual environmental contingencies, which in turn is due to their more pas-sive pattern of responding. To test this hypothesis, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants were exposed to an uncontrollable task and both their probability of responding and their judgment of control were assessed. As was expected, higher levels of depression correlated negatively with probability of responding and with the illusion of control. Implications for a therapy of depression are discussed.

Under some conditions dysphoric participants rate action-outcome contingencies differently from non-dysphorics. One variable that seems related is the length of inter trial interval (ITI). Increasing the ITIs results in increased judgements in nondysphorics but not dysphorics which, according to associative theory, should weaken context associations and so affect the contexts ability to interfere with the development of action–outcome learning. We report six experiments in which trial and stimulus spacing were manipulated testing the hypotheses that depressed versus non-depressed differences are based on either failure to extinguish or develop context outcome associations. Data were more consistent with an account of mood effects related to temporal characteristics of context processing

Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we propose that the realism of depressed individuals is caused not by an increased accuracy in perception, but by their more comprehensive exposure to the actual environmental contingencies, which in turn is due to their more passive pattern of responding. To test this hypothesis, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants were exposed to an uncontrollable task and both their probability of responding and their judgment of control were assessed. As was expected, higher levels of depression correlated negatively with probability of responding and with the illusion of control. Implications for a therapy of depression are discussed.

The authentic experience is a fundamental part of the vacation. The western tourist increasingly demands and needs more than sand and sea. Yet these needs are hard to meet at the category level and the experiential level. Thailand continues along the old theme of exoticness orientated around the biting instructions of the Ministry of Culture and the reassurances of the Ministry of Tourism in proclaiming a 'real' Thailand as accessible to the tourist. If Thailand seeks to regain the initiative it must greater understand the westerners' desires.

Several classic studies have concluded that the accuracy of identifying uncontrollable situations depends heavily on depressive mood. Nondepressed participants tend to exhibit an optimistic illusion of control, whereas depressed participants tend to better detect a lack of control. Recently, we suggested that the different activity levels (measured as the probability of responding during a contingency learning task) exhibited by depressed and nondepressed individuals is partly responsible for this effect. The two studies presented in this paper provide further support for this mediational hypothesis, in which mood is the distal cause of the illusion of control operating through activity level, the proximal cause. In Study 1, the probability of responding, P(R), was found to be a mediator variable between the depressive symptoms and the judgments of control. In Study 2, we intervened directly on the mediator variable: The P(R) for both depressed and nondepressed participants was mani...

A controversial finding in the field of causal learning is that mood contributes to the accuracy of perceptions of uncorrelated relationships. When asked to report the degree of control between an action and its outcome, people with dysphoria or depression are claimed to be more realistic in reporting non-contingency (e.g., . The strongest evidence for this depressive realism (DR) effect is derived from data collected with experimental procedures in which the dependent variables are verbal or written ratings of contingency or cause, and, perhaps more importantly, the independent variable in these procedures may be ambiguous and difficult to define. In order to address these possible confounds, we used a two-response free-operant causal learning task in which the dependent measures were performance based. Participants were required to respond to maximize the occurrence of a temporally contiguous outcome that was programmed with different probabilities, which also varied temporally across two responses. Dysphoric participants were more sensitive to the changing outcome contingencies than controls even though they responded at a similar rate. During probe trials, in which the outcome was masked, their performance recovered more quickly than that of the control group. These data provide unexpected support for the DR hypothesis suggesting that dysphoria is associated with heightened sensitivity to temporal shifts in contingency. Citation: Msetfi RM, Murphy RA and Kornbrot DE (2012) Dysphoric mood states are related to sensitivity to temporal changes in contingency. Front. Psychology 3:368.

Adattamento dell'incontro intitolato Attraversare il Deserto, Coltivare le Tenebre, tenutosi il 06/06/2019 a Spazio Morel, Lugano.

Il testo introduce il concetto di "ontologia depressiva", ibridando tra loro differenti elaborazioni nate in seno al cosiddetto realismo speculativo. A partire da questa ontologia "estrema", proverò a mostrare brevemente come certi stati emotivi/affettivi, comunemente ritenuti privi di valore gnoseologico, siano in grado di rivelare, attraverso imponenti slittamenti prospettici, importanti caratteristiche del nostro mondo. La prassi che ne risulterà sarà incentrata sul "coltivare le tenebre", ossia sul mantenersi in una scepsi fondata - anziché sull'inesistenza o sull'incertezza del "mondo esterno" -  sull'eccedenza del reale rispetto a ogni correlato.

Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we propose that the realism of depressed individuals is caused not by an increased accuracy in perception, but by their more comprehensive exposure to the actual environmental contingencies, which in turn is due to their more passive pattern of responding. To test this hypothesis, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants were exposed to an uncontrollable task and both their probability of responding and their judgment of control were assessed. As was expected, higher levels of depression correlated negatively with probability of responding and with the illusion of control. Implications for a therapy of depression are discussed.

In this paper, I ask whether depressive mood has epistemic and psychological benefits for the subject, and what is a character of the relation between such benefits.
Symptoms of depression are commonly perceived as psychological difficulties that compromise wellbeing. Considerations about the psychological costs of depressive mood and its adverse effects on functioning seem to rule out the possibility that ‘feeling low’ is linked to any benefits. Yet, it has been argued that in certain circumstances, depressive symptoms enhance more accurate beliefs about self and reality. One suggestion is that depressive mood enhances accuracy in respect of self-related judgments (depressive realism). This claim has been evidenced in numerous empirical studies over one’s sense of control in contingency tasks (that is, the tasks in which the outcome might be perceived as a result of the subject’s actions) (for ex. Alloy and Abramson, 1979; Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson and Kornbrot, 2005). Arguably, ‘feeling low’ can enhance the accuracy of one’s beliefs and help perceive the reality more precisely. In this paper I endorse this claim in a light of the available evidence and argue, that by making a contribution to the acquisition of more accurate beliefs, depressive mood can be seen as epistemically beneficial.
Furthermore I argue that by contributing to better accuracy of beliefs with regards to self, depressive mood carries also potential psychological benefits for the subject. Empirical evidence and real life observations show that accurate judgments of own capabilities can increase efficiency of self-defensive psychological strategy in a situation of experienced anxiety (defensive pessimism). Re-considering the phenomenon of depressive mood in terms of its potential epistemic and psychological benefits leads to a more balanced view of the role of depressive symptoms in a person’s cognitive and emotional life.


References:

Abramson, L. Y., Alloy, L. B., & Rosoff, R. (1981). Depression and the generation of complex hypotheses in the judgement of contingency. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 19, 35–45. doi:10.1016/0005-7967(81)90110-8
Msetfi, R. M., Murphy, R. A., Simpson, J., & Kornbrot, D. E. (2005). Depressive realism and outcome density bias in contingency judgments: the effect of the context and intertrial interval. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 134, 10–22. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.134.1.10

Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we propose that the realism of depressed individuals is caused not by an increased accuracy in perception, but by their more comprehensive exposure to the actual environmental contingencies, which in turn is due to their more passive pattern of responding. To test this hypothesis, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants were exposed to an uncontrollable task and both their probability of responding and their judgment of control were assessed. As was expected, higher levels of depression correlated negatively with probability of responding and with the illusion of control. Implications for a therapy of depression are discussed.