Healthline: New Study Debunks Old Theory That Depressed People Are Just More Realistic

“If you have depression, you may have been told at one point or another that looking on the bright side of life could improve your condition. Those close to you may have accused you of merely underestimating your abilities or insisted that you could overcome depression if you only embraced a little more optimism.

As frustrating as these remarks may be, these well-meaning people may have been working on a long-held assumption that depressed people are just more realistic. This notion stems from a theory known as Depressive Realism. The theory suggests that depressed people are less prone to optimistic bias and are simply more realistic in judging how much control they have over their lives. This notion comes from a 1979 study that examined whether a group of college students could predict how much control they had over whether a light turned green when they pushed a button.

The research found that depressed students were better at identifying when they had no control, while the students who weren’t depressed were more likely to overestimate their control of the lights. Since 1979, these findings have seeped into popular culture and fields of scientific study. However, new research refutes these findings and suggests that the results of the original study cannot be replicated.

In the new study, participants were pre-screened for depression beforehand. They were split into two groups – an online group and a college student group – and asked to complete a similar task to the one used in 1979. This time, researchers added a mechanism to measure bias and varied the level of control participants actually had.

The recent study did not match the results of the original. Instead, the participants with a higher level of depression in the online group actually overestimated their control. Meanwhile, the college student group showed that depression levels had little impact on their view of their control.``

Some Insights From This Article

• Depression was once posited as someone being more “realistic” and that people who didn’t struggle with depression were viewed as sometimes overly optimistic. This comes from a 1979 study in which depressed students were better at identifying situations in which they had no control.

• However, recent studies suggest that these earlier studies may have been non-replicable as they found that students that were depressed often overestimated their control. This may imply that depression may not necessarily mean “more realistic” as previously thought.

What does this mean for how we view and treat depression going forward??

Full article is here!

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