Induced mood and the illusion of control.

Abstract

Alloy and Abramson reported that depressed students give relatively accurate judgments of the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes while nondepressed students show an of and overestimate their impact on objectively uncontrollable outcomes that are frequent and/or desired. The present experiment examined the directionality of the relationship between realism in judging personal control and depression. Depressed and elated mood states were induced transiently in naturally nondepressed and depressed students, respectively, and the impact of these transient mood states on susceptibility to the illusion of control was assessed. Naturally nondepressed women made temporarily depressed gave accurate judgments of control while naturally depressed women made temporarily elated showed an illusion of control and overestimated their impact on an objectively uncontrollable outcome. In addition, mood induction groups showed predicted changes in self-reported affect and a behavioral measure of depression. These findings cannot be attributed to demand characteristics because nondepressed and depressed women instructed to simulate depression and elation, respectively, behaved differently than their respective mood induction groups. An intriguing implication of these findings may be that therapeutic interventions for depression that successfully remediate depressive symptoms may also increase depressed individuals' susceptibility to the illusion of control.