Depressive Realism

Definition

Depressive realism refers to the findings that depressed individuals tend to be more accurate or realistic than nondepressed persons in their judgments about themselves. Specifically, research suggests that nondepressed people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. This same research indicates that depressed people's judgments about themselves are often less biased.

Context and Importance

Depressive realism is provocative for two reasons. First, it contradicts both the intuitions of common sense and the mental health profession's assumption that mental health should be associated with a high capacity to perceive and test reality. Second, depressive realism also presents a serious challenge to cognitive theories of depression, which have become increasingly important over the past 30 years. According to cognitive theories, depressed individuals make judgments about themselves that are unrealistic, extreme, and illogical, and cognitive therapy for depression is designed to correct these irrational perceptions. If depressed people already view themselves realistically, their thought patterns may not need the correction that cognitive therapists propose to provide. In fact, there is good evidence that cognitive therapy works to alleviate depression, but it may work by training patients to construct optimistic illusions about themselves rather than by teaching them to think more realistically.

The study of depressive realism also may serve as a bridge between clinical and experimental psychology. Unlike neuropsychologists and visual perception researchers, clinical psychologists rarely have studied abnormal functioning to develop theories about normal psychology. However, an understanding of depressive realism may allow psychologists and researchers to see the adaptive functions of optimistic biases in normal human thinking.

Evidence

What is the evidence for depressive realism? In one of the first studies, depressed and nondepressed undergraduates were asked to judge their degree of control over an outcome of a button-pressing task. The experimenters systematically varied the actual degree of control as well as the frequency and valence (good or bad) of the outcome. Nondepressed students judged incorrectly that they had control over good outcomes but not bad ones. Depressed students might have been expected to show the opposite bias; instead, they were consistently accurate judges of their control over events. Many other studies of depressed children, college students, and older adults have confirmed these results. Experiments also show that depressed people are better than average at predicting events in their own lives, especially misfortunes. The participants in most of these studies were only moderately depressed, but it is not clear that even severely depressed people are unrealistically pessimistic. The evidence is mixed; some studies have found that even patients hospitalized for depression are quite realistic about themselves.

Depressive realism and nondepressive optimistic illusions are also seen in social situations. One study found that normal individuals and psychiatric outpatients who were not depressed rated their own social competence much higher than objective observers did. Depressed patients, in contrast, agreed with the observers. There is also evidence that depressed individuals are better at evaluating the impression they make on others and that depressed mothers report their children's behavior more accurately than do nondepressed mothers.

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