Predicting Changes in Depressive Symptoms From Valence Weighting During Attitude Generalization

Abstract

Negative cognitive biases both characterize and predict depressive symptoms. In the current study, we explored the role of individual differences in valence weighting, people's tendency to weight resemblance to a known positive versus a known negative more strongly when generalizing from their existing attitudes to novel objects. To assess participants' valence weighting proclivities, we had participants play a game in which they interacted with novel objects that had the ability to either decrease or increase participants' points. Following the game participants classified as good or bad (i.e., would increase or decrease points) the objects they saw during the game, as well as new objects that varied in resemblance to both positive and negative game objects. Participants had to generalize their positive and negative attitudes to these new objects and weight the negative and positive characteristics (i.e., their resemblance to good and bad objects encountered during the game). Thus, we could assess partic...