Accounting for depressive realism in contingency judgments: attentional processing differences

The purpose of this series of experiments was to determine the necessary conditions for eliciting depressive realism in a contingency judgment task and to compare the explanatory power of divergent theoretical accounts for this phenomenon. Across a series of experiments, groups of dysphoric and non-dysphoric undergraduate students (n1 = 46; n2 = 60) completed contingency judgment tasks, after which they estimated their control over the task. Depressive realism was elicited when the method of responding to the task was manipulated. Only when participants faced a choice between a "pressing" response option and a "not pressing" response option did dysphoric participants make more accurate judgments of control than nondysphoric participants, F(1, 59) = 11.24, p < .05. The evidence for a boundary condition identified in the current paper suggests important attentional differences between dysphoric and non-dysphoric individuals that must be explained by any theoretical account of depressive realism.