Negativity bias in evaluation of own personality traits in depressed persons

Abstract

There have been two views on how depressed people perceive themselves. One argues that they attend excessively to negative aspects of their selves. The other views that the depressed attend evenly to positive and negative sides of themselves, and the nondepressed persons attend more to their positive aspects. This study examined these views of cognitive bias, through a comparison of self referent judgments of trait adjcetives by mildly depressed and nondepressed groups of people. The Beck Depression Inventory was used to measure the severity of depression, and mildly depressed and nondepressed students, 342 in total, made self-referent judgments with a list of trait adjectives. The list consisted of pairs of semantically similar adjectives with contrasting desirability. With negative words, the mildly depressed tended to judge themselves more negatively than the nondepressed control. With positive words, no significant differences were found between the judgments by the two groups. It was concluded that negativity bias in self judgments was characteristic of the depressed persons.