New study challenges the idea that the saddest are the wisest

Forty-three years ago, two young psychologists, Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, reported the results of a simple experiment that led to a seminal idea in psychology.

His aim was to test the “helplessness theory” that depressed people tend to underestimate their ability to influence the world around them.

Alloy and Abramson classified the volunteers, all college students, as depressed and non-depressed based on self-reported symptoms, and provided each person with a button and a flashing light. Then they asked the volunteers to rate how much control they had over the light when they pressed the button.

What they discovered was surprising. It was concluded that depressed people had a more accurate reading of their ability to affect outcomes. Thus was born the hypothesis of “depressive realism”—the idea that depressed people sometimes have a more realistic view of their condition because they are free from the optimistic bias of their happy peers.

This idea, summarized in the original article as “sadder but wiser,” has been taught to psychology students for decades and cited more than 2,000 times by other scholars. It has also permeated our culture, introducing the idea that depression, for all its pain, can also offer some gifts to its sufferers.

A study published this month in the journal Collabra: Psychology by Amelia S. Dev and others questions that conclusion.

Recreating the original experiment, in which subjects were asked to assess whether pressing buttons would affect the light, the new research team found no association between depressive symptoms and outcome bias.

In one sample, patients with more depressive symptoms overestimated their control; in the second, depressive symptoms did not predict any particular bias.

“In two samples, we found no evidence that depressive symptoms are linked to greater realism,” the study said.

Don A. Moore, one of the authors of the new study, said the team came together around the question of whether “positive illusions” can improve performance, and that this led to the 1979 study.

“Its impact has been enormous, and it has been pervasive in so many aspects of research and pop culture that it is perhaps difficult to reverse,” Moore, a psychological researcher and professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Management, said of the study. original.

Under the influence of this theory, many psychologists have taught that “a little self-delusion is useful for getting through life,” he said. “You have to believe in yourself a little more than reality allows.”

“What we knew,” he said, “made us wonder if this effect would hold.”

A 2012 meta-analysis of 75 studies on depressive realism found that the overall effect of depressive realism was small and that the results were influenced by the study’s methodology. But it remained such a well-established notion that “we ran into skeptical reviewers along the way,” Moore said.

“If you’re trying to disprove a false positive that made its way into the literature, it’s a steep path,” he said.

Alloy, one of two psychologists who designed the original experiment, said in an interview that she does not believe the new work constitutes a major challenge to depressive realism because the research team was unable to directly replicate the original 1979 experiment.

“When they say they did a direct replication of our study, they didn’t,” said Alloy, a professor of psychology at Temple University. “It’s not a big challenge. The original conclusions are still valid.”

She said differences in the design of the two experiments could explain the variance in results. The new team did not find an “illusion of control” among non-depressed individuals, as the 1979 team did, which it said was unusual and made it difficult to interpret any results.

The new team repeatedly asked participants throughout the experiment to rate the probability that the light bulb would light up if they pressed the button, rather than waiting until the end, as the original researchers did. Also, she said, the new researchers prescreened subjects for symptoms of depression rather than tracking them on the day of the experiment, so their mood may have changed in that period.

She also said the research team recreated only the second of the four experiments in the 1979 paper, which had the least robust findings.

Finally, she disagreed with the researchers’ characterization of depressive realism, which, she said, occurs only under certain conditions.

“It’s just not true that depressed people are more accurate in their perception of the world,” she said. “That’s a very broad and general statement.” Subsequent studies identified conditions where depressive realism was present, which led to “more subtle and sophisticated conclusions,” she said. “What’s out there in the public may not have followed that.”

In the four decades since Alloy and Abramson published their paper, the “saddest but wiser” idea has not driven emerging treatments. Doctors have gravitated to cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps depressed patients identify distortions in their thoughts.

“We would be doing the client a disservice by accepting that what he says is a reality, and not, through a delicate Socratic process, asking him to explore and examine his thought pattern,” said Allen Miller, a clinical psychologist at the Beck Institute, who did not participate in the study.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves