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Biomedical subjects

L B Alloy

Publications and source records attributed to L B Alloy.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

The response styles theory of depression: tests and an extension of the theory.

The authors tested and extended S. Nolen-Hoeksema's (1991) response styles (RSs) theory of depression by assessing the role of RSs in the onset of depressive episodes (DEs), controlling for the effects of concurrent depression, examining the dispositional aspects of RS, clarifying the role of distraction in the course of a DE, and studying the predictive validity of the Response Styles Questionnaire, Nondepressed (ND) participants who reported that they ruminate in response to their depressive symptoms were more likely to experience a DE over 18 months than were participants who reported that they distract themselves from their symptoms. Both a ruminative RS as measured in an ND state and the use of rumination during the first DE predicted the severity of that episode. In contrast, neither trait nor state rumination predicted the duration of the first DE. Participants showed moderate stability of RSs over 1 year and responded in a consistent manner when depressed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1993

Automatic and effortful processing in depression.

Automatic processes require few attentional resources, but effortful processes use attentional capacity. Research on cognitive processing by depressed individuals is reviewed and the following is concluded: (a) Depression interferes with effortful processing. The degree of interference is determined by the degree of effortfulness of the task, the severity of depression, and the valence of the stimulus material to be processed. (b) Depression interferes only minimally with automatic processes. Hypothetical causal mechanisms for interference in effortful processes by depression, whether interference in effortful processing is unique to depression or characteristic of psychopathology in general, and whether negative automatic thoughts are associated with current depression or depression proneness are also addressed. The effortful-automatic perspective has implications for understanding depressive clinical features, treating depression, and conducting future research.

Attention↗
PubMed1992

Illusion of control: invulnerability to negative affect and depressive symptoms after laboratory and natural stressors.

We examined whether individual differences in susceptibility to the illusion of control predicted differential vulnerability to depressive responses after a laboratory failure and naturally occurring life stressors. The illusion of control decreased the likelihood that subjects (N = 145) would (a) show immediate negative mood reactions to the laboratory failure, (b) become discouraged after naturally occurring negative life events, and (c) experience increases in depressive symptoms a month later given the occurrence of a high number of negative life events. In addition, the stress-moderating effect of the illusion of control on later depressive symptoms appeared to be mediated in part by its effect on reducing the discouragement subjects experienced from the occurrence of negative life events. These findings provide support for the hopelessness theory of depression and for the optimistic illusion-mental health link.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Depression and selection of positive and negative social feedback: motivated preference or cognitive balance?

In this commentary we examine Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, and Pelham's (1992) findings with respect to each of 5 central propositions in self-verification theory. We conclude that although the data are consistent with self-verification theory, none of the 5 components of the theory have been demonstrated convincingly as yet. Specifically, we argue that depressed subjects' selection of social feedback appears to be balanced or evenhanded rather than biased toward negative feedback and that there is little evidence to indicate that depressives actively seek negative appraisals. Furthermore, we suggest that the studies are silent with respect to the motivational postulates of self-verification theory and that a variety of competing cognitive and motivational models can explain Swann et al.'s findings as well as self-verification theory.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Interpersonal perceptions and consequences of depressive-significant other relationships: a naturalistic study of college roommates.

We investigated social perceptions and consequences of depression and anxiety in roommate relationships. Mildly depressed, anxious but nondepressed, and nondepressed-nonanxious students (targets) and normal, same-sex roommates (a) rated the interpersonal impact on themselves of typical associations with their roommates and (b) judged their own interpersonal impact. Only depressed men received negative evaluations and emotional reactions from their roommates. However, depressed women reported more negative reactions to their normal roommates than vice versa. Finally, depressed targets perceived their interpersonal impact negatively, whereas their normal roommates perceived their own interpersonal impact as overly positive. These findings suggest that negative relationships between depressives and nondepressed others may be attributable, at least in part, to both participants' misperceptions of their social behavior and its consequences.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Processing of ambiguous and unambiguous feedback by depressed and nondepressed college students: schematic biases and their implications for depressive realism.

Explored schematic processing as a mechanism for predicting (a) when depressed Ss would be negative relative to nondepressed Ss and (b) when depressed and nondepressed Ss would show biased or unbiased (i.e., "realistic") processing. Depressed and nondepressed Ss performed multiple trials of a task under conditions in which the two groups held either equivalent or different schemas regarding this task. Ss received either an unambiguous or objectively normed ambiguous feedback cue on each trial. In full support of schematic processing, depressed Ss showed negative encoding relative to nondepressed Ss only when their schemas were more negative, and both depressed and nondepressed Ss showed positively biased, negatively biased, and unbiased encoding depending on the relative feedback cue-to-schema match. Depressed and nondepressed Ss' response latencies to unambiguous feedback also supported the occurrence of schematic processing. We discuss the methodological, treatment, and "realism" implications of these findings and suggest a more precise formulation of Beck's schema theory of depression.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Attributional style, depression, and perceptions of consensus for events.

This study examined differences between depressed and nondepressed individuals' implicit perceptions of consensus, which may contribute to differences in their attributional styles. Subjects rated the extent to which positive, negative, and neutral events happen to themselves and to the average college student and completed measures of depth of depression and attributional style. Perceptions of consensus were highly correlated with all components of attributional style for negative and positive events. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that ratings of others explained variance in attributional style beyond that explained by ratings of the self for positive but not for negative events. Path analyses, however, indicated that the indirect path from perceptions of consensus to depression mediated through attributional style was nonsignificant for positive events, although it was significant for negative events. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of perceptions of others as precursors of attributional style and depression.

Cognition↗
PubMed1988

The hopelessness theory of depression: attributional aspects.

In this article, we clarify, expand and revise the basic postulates of the hopelessness theory of depression (Abramson, Alloy & Metalsky, 1988a; Abramson, Metalsky & Alloy, 1987, 1988b; previously referred to as the reformulated helplessness theory of depression: Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale, 1978) and place the theory more explicitly in the context of work in descriptive psychiatry about the heterogeneity among the depressive disorders. We suggest that the hopelessness theory hypothesizes the existence in nature of an, as yet, unidentified subtype of depression--'hopelessness depression'--defined, in part, by its cause. We then give a critique of work conducted to test the hopelessness theory and explicate the limitations in research strategy associated with this line of work. Our critique includes a logical analysis that deduces the conceptual and methodological inadequacies of the research strategies used to test the theory. Finally, we suggest more adequate research strategies for testing the hopelessness theory and discuss conceptual and assessment issues that will arise in conducting such tests with special emphasis on attributional styles.

Depressive Disorder↗
PubMed1987

Depression and pessimism for the future: biased use of statistically relevant information in predictions for self versus others.

The cognitive theories of depression emphasize the role of pessimism about the future in the etiology and maintenance of depression. The present research was designed for two reasons: to provide a clear demonstration that depressed individuals' predictions of the likelihood of future outcomes are more pessimistic than those of nondepressed individuals given identical information with which to make forecasts and identical conditions for forecasting, and to test two additional hypotheses regarding possible mechanisms underlying depressives' relative pessimism in forecasting: a social-comparison and a differential attributional-style hypothesis. We used a modification of the cue-use paradigm developed by Ajzen (1977, Experiment 1) and examined depressed and nondepressed people's predictions of the likelihood of future positive and negative outcomes for themselves and for others. The results provided strong support for pessimism on the part of depressed individuals relative to nondepressed individuals in forecasts for both self and others. In addition, whereas nondepressives exhibited a self-enhancing bias in which they overestimated their probability of success and underestimated their probability of failure relative to that of similar others, depressives did not succumb to either positive or negative social comparison biases in prediction. Finally, in line with the attributional-style hypothesis, depressed-nondepressed differences in subjects' cue-use patterns were obtained, especially in forecasts for self. The findings are discussed with respect to the mechanisms underlying predictive optimism and pessimism and the possible functions and implications of these predictive biases.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Interaction of Pavlovian conditioning with a zero operant contingency: chronic exposure to signaled inescapable shock maintains learned helplessness effects.

In four experiments we used triads, consisting of escapable-shock (ES), yoked inescapable-shock (IS), and no-shock (NS) rats, to investigate the effect of the interaction between Pavlovian contingencies and a zero operant contingency (i.e., uncontrollability) upon subsequent shock-escape acquisition in the shuttle box. After exposure to 50 signals and shocks per session for nine sessions, interference with shuttle box escape acquisition for IS rats was a monotonically increasing function of the percentage of signal-shock pairings during training (Experiment 1), with 50% pairings producing little or no impairment. Without regard to signaling, ES rats performed as well as NS rats. Experiment 2 demonstrated that our training and test conditions led to substantial and equal impairment in IS rats preexposed for one session to 100% or 50% signal-shock pairings or to unsignaled shocks. In Experiment 3, chronic exposure to 100% signaled inescapable shocks resulted in impairment only if the signal (light) was present during the shuttle box test. The continuous presence of the signal during the test contrasted with its discrete (5-s) presentation during training and suggested that an antagonistic physiological reaction rather than a specific competing motor response had been conditioned. Experiment 4 provided evidence for possible conditioned opioid mediation by demonstrating contemporaneous stress-induced analgesia and shock-escape impairment in IS rats chronically exposed to 100%, but not to 50%, signal-shock pairings, and the elimination of both analgesia and escape interference by the opiate antagonist naltrexone. Thus, chronic exposure to uncontrollable shocks appears to maintain the impairment produced by acute exposure only if the shocks are adequately signaled.

Animals↗
PubMed1984

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

Recently, it has been discovered that depressed people are less likely than nondepressed people to succumb to an "illusion of control" and judge that their actions influence outcomes that are objectively uncontrollable. This experiment examined the relationship between depression and susceptibility to the illusion of control for oneself and for others. Depressed and nondepressed college students were asked to judge either how much control they themselves had or how much control a male or female confederate had over a noncontingent, but positive, outcome. Replicating past findings on depression and judgments of control, depressed subjects judged relatively accurately that they exerted little control over the experimental outcome, whereas nondepressed subjects overestimated their personal control. Subjects' judgments of the confederates' control were a function of the subject's mood state and sex as well as of the confederate's sex. With one exception (depressed males in the male other condition), depressed subjects tended to overestimate the confederate's (male or female) control over the noncontingent outcome. Nondepressed females also judged that the confederate (male or female) exerted a high degree of control, thus succumbing to the illusion of control both for themselves and others. Nondepressed males, on the other hand, tended to judge more accurately that the confederate (particularly the female confederate) exerted little control and thus, succumbed to the illusion of control for themselves but not for others. These findings imply that an adequate understanding of depressive and nondepressive cognition requires an interpersonal as well as an intrapsychic perspective.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Attributional style and the generality of learned helplessness.

According to the logic of the attribution reformulation of learned helplessness, the interaction of two factors influences whether helplessness experienced in one situation will transfer to a new situation. The model predicts that people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to global factors will show helplessness deficits in new situations that are either similar or dissimilar to the original situation in which they were helpless. In contrast, people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to only specific factors will show helplessness deficits in situations that are similar, but not dissimilar, to the original situation in which they were helpless. To test these predictions, we conducted two studies in which undergraduates with either a global or specific attributional style for negative outcomes were given one of three pretreatments in the typical helplessness triadic design: controllable bursts of noise, uncontrollable bursts of noise, or no noise. In Experiment 1, students were tested for helplessness deficits in a test situation similar to the pretreatment setting, whereas in Experiment 2, they were tested in a test situation dissimilar to the pretreatment setting. The findings were consistent with predictions of the reformulated helplessness theory.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Depression, social comparison, and the false-consensus effect.

In general, people perceive high consensus for their own attributes (i.e., the false-consensus effect). Depressed and nondepressed college students were asked about the extent to which depression-relevant and depression-irrelevant attributes were true of themselves and true of the "average college student." Subjects were also asked questions assessing the accuracy of their perceptions of others. Depressed subjects showed less false consensus than nondepressed subjects. Although depressives characterized themselves as dissimilar to others, they showed no consistent bias to depreciate themselves relative to others. Nondepressives, on the other hand, consistently enhanced themselves relative to others, although the magnitude of their self-other differences was smaller than that of depressives. Interestingly, the tendency to depreciate themselves relative to others on negative depression-relevant items was a better predictor of severity of depression than self-perceptions or other perceptions alone. Findings regarding the accuracy of perceptions of others were mixed. The study is discussed in terms of its implications for the false-consensus effect, depressive attributional style, nondepressive self-serving biases, and therapy for depression.

Depression↗
PubMed1982

Learned helplessness, depression, and the illusion of control.

Do people previously exposed to uncontrollable aversive events, like naturally depressed people, fail to succumb to an illusion of control in a situation in which events occur noncontingently but are associated with success? Depressed and nondepressed college students were assigned to one of three groups that make up the typical triad used in studies of learned helplessness: controllable noises, uncontrollable noises, or no noises. Following pretreatment, subjects judged how much control they had in a noncontingency learning problem. For half of the subjects, events were noncontingent and associated with failure; whereas for the remaining subjects, events were noncontingent but associated with success. Contrary to the predictions of learned helplessness theory, nondepressed subjects previously exposed to uncontrollable noises showed a robust illusion of control in the condition in which events were noncontingent but associated with success, whereas nondepressed subjects previously exposed to controllable noises judged control accurately. Depressed subjects also judged control accurately regardless of their previous noise experience, The results were interpreted as consistent with the egotism hypothesis.

Achievement↗