Illusion of control for self and others in depressed and nondepressed college students

Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients have a reduced sense of control on the illusion of control task

There is disagreement regarding the role of perceived control in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). The present study used a traditional illusion of control paradigm (Alloy and Abramson, 1979) to empirically test control estimation in OCD. Twenty-six OCD patients and 26 matched comparison subjects completed an illusion of control task wherein their goal was to attempt to exert control over a light bulb. The density of reinforcement (high, low) and the valence of trials (gain, loss) were experimentally manipulated within subjects. Unbeknownst to participants, the illumination of the light bulb was predetermined and irrespective of their behavior. OCD patients exhibited lower estimates of control compared with healthy comparison subjects. There were no interactions between group and outcome density or group and valence. We found that OCD patients endorse lower estimates of control than comparison subjects. This finding highlights a potential role for contingency learning in the disorder.

Context and time in causal learning: contingency and mood dependent effects

Defining cues for instrumental causality are the temporal, spatial and contingency relationships between actions and their effects. In this study, we carried out a series of causal learning experiments that systematically manipulated time and context in positive and negative contingency conditions. In addition, we tested participants categorized as non-dysphoric and mildly dysphoric because depressed mood has been shown to affect the processing of all these causal cues. Findings showed that causal judgements made by non-dysphoric participants were contextualized at baseline and were affected by the temporal spacing of actions and effects only with generative, but not preventative, contingency relationships. Participants categorized as dysphoric made less contextualized causal ratings at baseline but were more sensitive than others to temporal manipulations across the contingencies. These effects were consistent with depression affecting causal learning through the effects of slowed time experience on accrued exposure to the context in which causal events took place. Taken together, these findings are consistent with associative approaches to causal judgement.

Dysphoric Mood States are Related to Sensitivity to Temporal Changes in Contingency

A controversial finding in the field of causal learning is that mood contributes to the accuracy of perceptions of uncorrelated relationships. When asked to report the degree of control between an action and its outcome, people with dysphoria or depression are claimed to be more realistic in reporting non-contingency (e.g., Alloy and Abramson, 1979). The strongest evidence for this depressive realism (DR) effect is derived from data collected with experimental procedures in which the dependent variables are verbal or written ratings of contingency or cause, and, perhaps more importantly, the independent variable in these procedures may be ambiguous and difficult to define. In order to address these possible confounds, we used a two-response free-operant causal learning task in which the dependent measures were performance based. Participants were required to respond to maximize the occurrence of a temporally contiguous outcome that was programmed with different probabilities, which also varied temporally across two responses. Dysphoric participants were more sensitive to the changing outcome contingencies than controls even though they responded at a similar rate. During probe trials, in which the outcome was masked, their performance recovered more quickly than that of the control group. These data provide unexpected support for the DR hypothesis suggesting that dysphoria is associated with heightened sensitivity to temporal shifts in contingency.

Better, Stronger, Faster: Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis

Self-serving judgments, in which the self is viewed more favorably than other people, are ubiquitous. Their dynamic variation within individuals may be explained in terms of the regulation of affect. Self-serving judgments produce positive emotions, and threat increases self-serving judgments (a compensatory pattern that restores affect to a set point or baseline). Perceived mutability is a key moderator of these judgments; low mutability (i.e., the circumstance is closed to modification) triggers a cognitive response aimed at affect regulation, whereas high mutability (i.e., the circumstance is open to further modification) activates direct behavioral remediation. Threats often require immediate response, whereas positive events do not. Because of this brief temporal window, an active mechanism is needed to restore negative (but not positive) affective shifts back to a set point. Without this active reset, an earlier threat would make the individual less vigilant toward a new threat. Thus, when people are sad, they aim to return their mood to baseline, often via self-serving judgments. We argue that asymmetric homeostasis enables optimal vigilance, which establishes a coherent theoretical account of the role of self-serving judgments in affect regulation.

ARE DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS POSITIVELY OR NEGATIVELY ASSOCIATED WITH THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL?

This research addressed whether depressive symptoms were positively or negatively associated with the extent to which research participants showed an illusion of control. In Study 1, 85 female college students participated in a psychokinesis (PK) task and completed a magical ideation scale. Consistent with research reported by Thalbourne and others (e.g., Thalbourne & Delin, 1994), participants who showed higher levels of depressive symptoms also showed higher illusory control scores. In Study 2, 105 participants completed a precognition task and a PK task as well as a judgment of contingency task used by Alloy and Abramson (1979) to test the so-called “depressive realism” hypothesis. Factor analysis confirmed two factors, one on which the judgments on the Precognition and PK tasks loaded and one on which the judgment on the contingency task loaded. Results replicated the finding in Study 1 for the paranormal tasks. For the contingency task, consistent with Alloy and Abramson's depressive realism model, participants showing higher levels of depressive symptoms also showed lower illusory control scores. Results are related to research that documents a relation between various forms of magical thinking and psychopathology.

Depression and evaluative schemata

The evaluative tendencies of nondepressed, mildly depressed, and severely depressed individuals are examined in the areas of judgments of contingency, attributions of causality, expectancy estimates, and self-schemata/self-reference. The available empirical literature in these four areas indicates that nondepressed people tend to exhibit positivistic evaluative responses, whereas mildly depressed persons tend to display unbiased (neither positivistic nor negativistic) evaluative response patterns. The available evidence is suggestive of negativistic evaluative tendencies in severely depressed individuals, with this bias being most clearly manifested in the area of self-schemata/self-reference. These results are interpreted in terms of contemporary explanations of depression and recent advances in models of cognitive processing.