Abstract
The present study was conducted to investigate the differences between cognition of mildly-depressed and non-depressed people concerning severity of undesirable events. Achievement and interpersonal situations were selected as experimental situations and three severity levels were set up for each situation. Subjects were divided into three groups by SDS (self-rating depression scale) scores and the upper third was taken as “mildly-depressed” and the lower third was taken as “non-depressed”. Subjects read short sentences which describe achievement situations or interpersonal situations and rated how they liked each situation. Results were such that mildly-depressed did not distinguish severity of the situations while non-depressed did. There found no difference between likability ratings of mildly-depressed and non-depressed. The relationships between undistinguishing cognitive tendency, globality dimension of attributional style and cognitive complexity of mildly-depressed should be taken into consideration. To investigate the role of this tendency not to distinguish severity of undesirable events of mildly-depressed in generation and maintenance of depression would be an important theme in the future research.
