My last post focused on depression and it reminded me of something that I keep telling my students and they all react with disbelief. Well, I tell them a lot of things to which they react with disbelief, to be sure, but this one I keep thinking it should not generate such incredulity. The thing is: depressed people perceive the same amount of negative events happening to them as healthy people, but far fewer positive ones. This seems to be counter-intuitive to non-professionals, who believe depressed people are just generally sadder than average and that’s why they see the half-empty side of the glass of life.
So I dug out the original paper who found this… finding. It’s not as old as you might think. Peeters et al. (2003) paid $30/capita to 86 people, 46 of which were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and seeking treatment in a community mental health center or outpatient clinic (this is in Netherlands). None were taking antidepressants or any other drugs, except low-level anxiolytics. Each participant was given a wristwatch that beeped 10 times a day at semi-random intervals of approximately 90 min. When the watch beeped, the subjects had to complete a form within maximum 25 min answering questions about their mood, currents events, and their appraisal of those events. The experiment took 6 days, including weekend.
The results? Contrary to popular belief, people with depression “did not report more frequent negative events, although they did report fewer positive events and appraised both types of events as more stressful” (p. 208). In other words, depressed people are not seeing half-empty glasses all the time; instead, they don’t see the half-full glasses. Note that they regarded both negative and positive events as stressful. We circle back to the ‘stress is the root of all evil‘ thing.
I would have liked to see if the decrease in positive affect and perceived happy events correlates with increased sadness. The authors say that “negative events were appraised as more unpleasant, more important, and more stressful by the depressed than by the healthy participants ” (p. 206), but, curiously, the mood was assessed with ratings on the feeling anxious, irritated, restless, tense, guilty, irritable, easily distracted, and agitate, and not a single item on depression-iconic feelings: sad, empty, hopeless, worthless.
Nevertheless, it’s a good psychological study with in depth statistical analyses. I also found thought-provoking this paragraph: “The literature on mood changes in daily life is dominated by studies of daily hassles. The current results indicate that daily uplifts are also important determinants of mood, in both depressed and healthy people” (p. 209).
REFERENCE: Peeters F, Nicolson NA, Berkhof J, Delespaul P, & deVries M. (May 2003). Effects of daily events on mood states in major depressive disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 112(2):203-11. PMID: 12784829, DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.112.2.203. ARTICLE
By Neuronicus, 4 May 2019
The Science Portal 