Optimism Bias and Depression
People tend to have an optimism bias, preferring and viewing desirable information over undesirable information. However, people diagnosed with depression often have a more pessimistic view of the future.
A recent study suggests that the future expectations of people with unpleasant moods become more optimistic when they are asked to make optimistic future predictions about the future. In this study, we investigated the different effects of elicited optimism training, in which participants with various levels of normal unpleasant mood (low, mild, and high) made optimistic future predictions to change their beliefs about the future.
General participants were recruited and
(n = 69) from local university students and divided the participants into three groups (low, mild, and high discomfort) by measuring their discomfort mood.
These three groups were assigned to an elicited optimistic training or control condition, and after training, participants performed a two-stage belief updating task.
In the first stage, participants estimated their personal probability of experiencing an adverse event, while at the same time being presented with the average probability of the event occurring to a living person. This information could be desirable or undesirable to the participants. To assess how the desirable and undesirable information affected their beliefs, participants estimated their personal probability of experiencing the event again in the second stage.
The amount of updating error was computed as the difference between the first and second stage estimates, and the difference between the errors was classified as updating bias.
As a result.
Individuals with mild discomfort after the elicited optimistic training showed a higher update bias than the low (p <.001) and high discomfort mood (p <.05) groups in the elicited optimistic condition.
There is no significant difference in the control group.
Results show that individuals in the mildly unpleasant mood group showed an increase in renewal bias after exposure to the elicited optimism training. Unpleasant mood and trait optimism did not change in both the experimental and control groups.In conclusion, the results show that people with mild discomfort are affected by the induction of optimistic thoughts.
Yoshimura, S., Hashimoto, Y. The effect of induced optimism on the optimistic update bias. BMC Psychol 8, 28 (2020). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-0389-6
Summary
The study shows that people with mild discomfort are affected by induced optimism and become more optimistic, but people with moderate to severe discomfort and depression are not affected.
I imagined that the results of this study would be painful for students who are not prepared to study well before a test because of uncertain information from their friends, such as "I found out the test range, and it seems to be very easy from here to here.We all have an optimistic bias that causes us to underestimate undesirable information and overestimate desirable information.
If you are reading this article and you are told that if you continue to smoke you will be sick and in trouble in 10 years, how you react will determine whether or not you have a strong optimistic bias.
Many people may think that since they are not going to get sick right now, they can just stop when they start to feel worse. However, people with depressive symptoms or other sensitivities may act like they are going to stop immediately because they were told something that makes them feel uneasy, and they may overreact to secondhand smoke when they go out.
It's a bias that we all have, and we want to use it well to maintain our psychological well-being, but it's also a bias that can get in the way of our decision-making, so knowing about it is very different from not knowing about it.
