![]() ![]() Participants with high levels of depression were less likely to predict experiencing a positive event and more likely to predict experiencing a negative event. Individuals experiencing high levels of depressive symptoms showed a reduced optimism bias when estimating the probability of experiencing a life event. Recent work has extended this theory to beliefs about the probability of experiencing future life events. A loss of these positive biases sometimes referred to as ‘depressive realism’, may perpetuate depression symptoms through reinforcing negative views of the self. Positive processing biases may be protective for mental health in increasing self-esteem, confidence and life satisfaction. In comparison, depression is associated with less optimistic, but more accurate estimates. For example, people in the general population are overly optimistic in their judgements of self-performance. Thus, rather than being pessimistic per se, depression may be better characterized as a loss of the optimistic outlook seen in healthy individuals. However, while depressed individuals' self-beliefs and world views may be more pessimistic relative to healthy controls, evidence is emerging that this may be because healthy controls hold overly optimistic beliefs about themselves and their world views. Symptom improvement can be observed when dysfunctional schema and biased cognition are addressed in therapy, suggesting a potential causal role. Information is processed in a manner consistent with these views, resulting in negative cognitive biases. Individuals experiencing depression are believed to hold pessimistic views of themselves, their future and the world around them. However, further research is required to understand the specificity of this to negative events, and into refining methods for quantifying belief updating in clinical and non-clinical research.Ĭognitive neuropsychological models of depression emphasize the role of maladaptive negative beliefs in contributing to the development and maintenance of depression. Our results add confidence to previous findings that depression is characterized by negative future expectations maintained by reduced updating in response to good news. While we did not find statistical evidence that patterns of belief updating between groups varied by valence ( β = −0.51, 95% CI: −1.16, 0.15), mean update scores suggested that both groups showed largely similar updating for positive life events. However, our findings for positive events were inconclusive. ![]() Whereas healthy participants updated their beliefs more following good news than bad, individuals experiencing depression lacked this bias. Replicating previous research, healthy and depression groups differed in belief updating for negative events ( β = 0.71, 95% CI: 0.24, 1.18). We conducted the first independent replication of this effect and extended this work to examine whether reduced optimistic belief updating in depression also occurs for positive life events. By contrast, individuals with depression update their beliefs by a similar amount, showing reduced optimism. This is referred to as optimistic belief updating. When asked to evaluate their probability of experiencing a negative life event, healthy individuals update their beliefs more following good news than bad. ![]()
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