Change in Bias Following Cognitive Therapy for Depression: An Investigation of Multiple Emotionally Engaging Judgments
Year: 2012
Type: article
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: Prior research has shown that people with depression tend to think more negatively than people without depression.However, there is disagreement in the literature as to whether people with the highest depressive symptom severity tend to make either overly negative judgments or accurate judgments.Empirical research addressing the differences between these hypotheses is needed because the theoretical basis for one of the most successful treatments for depression, cognitive therapy (CT), is based in the assumption that people with depression tend to think in an unrealistic, pessimistic manner.Treatment-seeking adults with major depressive disorder (N=67) participated in a series of prediction tasks before and after a 16-week course of CT.Healthy controls matched demographically to treatment completers (N=45) also completed these tasks.The tasks included future life event prediction, prediction of significant others' ratings of participants' personality characteristics, and prediction of daily affective experiences.Outcomes were recorded, and a measure of optimistic / pessimistic bias was calculated by using participants' predictions and outcomes.Depressed clients were pessimistically biased on a portion of their predictions of daily affective experiences, optimistically biased on the life events task and other portions of the experience sampling task, and not systematically biased on the personality rating task.Though depressed clients' predictions and outcomes at intake were more negative than those of controls, patients and controls largely did not significantly differ in their levels of bias.Additionally, though predictions and outcomes iii improved from intake to post-treatment among depressed clients, bias generally did not change.Overall, the study largely failed to identify evidence of bias among depressed clients or that bias was reduced with a course of cognitive therapy for depression.However, clients' predictions did become more positive over the course of treatment.Further research should investigate potential moderators of pessimistic bias, such as presence of schemas in particular domains or use of specific coping strategies.
Author: Lizabeth A. Goldstein
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W114405247