Imperfect Cognitions

In this post PhD student Magdalena Antrobus (pictured above) summarises her recent research for Project PERFECT concerning the phenomenon known in the empirical literature as ‘depressive realism’. Depressive realism is the thesis that people with depression make more realistic inferences than ‘healthy’ individuals (Alloy and Abramson 1988).  The term refers to the phenomenon discovered in 1979 in a series of experiments designed around assessing the judgement of contingency tasks (Alloy and Abramson 1979) . The assessments of control made by participants with symptoms of depression were more accurate than those made by ‘healthy’ individuals. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant, making the results conclusive. People with depressive symptoms judged their control over uncontrollable events correctly, whilst the judgements made by individuals without depressive symptoms have been shown to exhibit a positive cognitive bias. Could people who ...