Depressive Realism - Studies

Studies

Studies by psychologists Alloy and Abramson (1979) and Dobson and Franche (1989) suggested that depressed people appear to have a more realistic perception of their importance, reputation, locus of control, and abilities than those who are not depressed.

People with depression may be less likely to have inflated self-images and look at the world through "rose-colored glasses", thanks to cognitive dissonance elimination and a variety of other defense mechanisms that allow them to ignore or otherwise look beyond the harsh realities of life.

This does not necessarily imply that a specific happy person is delusional nor deny that some depressed individuals may be unrealistically negative (as in studies by Pacini, Muir and Epstein, 1995).

Some recent studies argue contrary to the hypothesis, suggesting that mentally healthy people actually have fewer positive illusions and illusions in general than depressed ones. For example, studies by Msetfi et al. (2003, 2006) found that when replicating Alloy and Abramsons findings the overestimation of control in nondepressed people only showed up when the interval was long enough, implying that this is because they take more aspects of a situation into account than their depressed counterparts, and other studies such as Joiner et al. (2006) or Moore et al. (2009) found that all forms of illusion, positive or not, were associated with higher depressive symptoms. It might also be that the pessimistic bias of depressives results in "depressive realism" when, for example, measuring estimation of control when there is none, as proposed by Allan et al. (2007). Various other recent studies such as Fu et al.(2004), Carsona et al.(2009) and Boyd-Wilson et al. (2000) reject the idea of depressive realism by showing no link between positive illusions and mental health, well-being or life satisfaction maintaining that accurate perception of reality is compatible with happiness.

A longitudinal study (Colvin et al. 1995) found that self-enhancement biases were associated with poor social skills and psychological maladjustment. In a separate experiment where videotaped conversations between men and women were rated by independent observers, self-enhancing individuals were more likely to show socially problematic behaviors such as hostility or irritability. A 2007 study (Sedikides et al.) found that self-enhancement biases were associated with psychological benefits (such as subjective well-being) but also inter- and inter-personal costs (such as anti-social behavior).

When studying the link between self-esteem and positive illusions, Compton (1992) identified a group of successful persons which possessed high self-esteem without positive illusions, and that these individuals weren't depressed, neurotic, psychotic, maladjusted nor personality disordered, thus concluding that positive illusions aren't necessary for high self-esteem. Compared to the group not so successful with positive illusions and high self-esteem, the disillusional group with high self-esteem was higher on self-criticism and personality integration and lower on psychoticism.

A meta-analysis of 78 studies including 7305 subjects by Moore and Fresco (2012) found that slightly more studies supported the depressive realism hypothesis (Cohen’s d = -.07, SD = .46). Both depressed and nondepressed participants were found to be strongly positively biased, which does not go in line with the hypothesis. Studies lacking an objective standard of reality and that utilize self-report measures to assess depression were more likely to find depressive realism effects. There also was a significant moderation to the effect by the method which was used to measure depressive realism (however, it should be noted that this was an exploratory analysis). Judgment of contingency and recall of feedback studies produced very small depressive realism effects owing to biases in opposing directions in both depressed and nondepressed groups (a negative bias in the former and positive bias in the later). Evaluation of performance studies, however, demonstrated small anti-depressive realism effects.