Jack E. Hokanson

Induction of depressive affect after prolonged exposure to a mildly depressed individual.

Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were periodically obtained from the roommates of college students who exhibited a persistent mild depression over a 3-month period. For comparative purposes, BDI scores were also obtained from roommates of individuals who were transiently depressed and from subjects with nondepressed roommates. In comparison with control subjects, the roommates of persistently depressed persons displayed a progressive increase in BDI score over the course of the study.

Cluster analysis of depressed college students' social behaviors.

Measures of interpersonal behaviors exhibited by depressed college students toward their dormitory roommates were cluster analyzed, and this procedure produced 2 relatively distinct subgroups: a dependent, friendly, overgenerous type and an autocratic, competitive, aggressive, mistrustful type. These 2 groups were studied over a 9-month period; findings revealed that behaviors associated with each cluster were relatively stable and unrelated to gender or initial symptom severity. In longitudinal analyses, depressives in one group showed symptom abatement across time, whereas symptoms of the other group remained elevated. The roommates of depressives exhibited relatively high levels of hostility and a progressive decline in social contact and satisfaction with their depressed cohabitant. The results are discussed in relation to other typological approaches to unipolar depression.

Responses to depressed interpersonal behavior: mixed reactions in a helping role.

We placed 144 female subjects in a helping role and randomly assigned them to interact with a confederate in a 3 X 3 X 2 X 2 (Psychopathology X Blaming X Advice Seeking X Sex of Confederate) factorial design. In order to study behaviors that mediate interpersonal responses to depression, male and female confederates enacted depressed, anxious, or normal roles and blamed themselves, others, or no one for their problems. The confederates requested advice in half of the conditions. Results indicated that depressed confederates were rejected more on questionnaire measures; however, depressed confederates received more conversational advice and support from subjects than did the equally disturbed anxious confederates. The self-blaming and advice-seeking manipulations did not interact with depression to produce more negative reactions in subjects. There was no evidence of a negative mood induction in subjects, nor did the sex of the confederate have important interpersonal consequences. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological issues in studies of interpersonal factors in depression.

Interpersonal Factors in Depression

The aim of this chapter is to review theories and lines of research that implicate interpersonal processes in depression. To begin, principal theories of depression that emphasize interpersonal factors will be presented. This section includes a review of the specific conceptual questions that are pertinent to each theory. The second portion of the chapter presents a critical review of the empirical literature, along with commentary on methodological problems in this area of research. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the current status of the literature and suggestions for future work.

The processing of social information by mildly and moderately dysphoric college students

Two experiments are reported in which dysphoric and nondysphoric subjects were presented (in an acquaintanceship paradigm) with a standardized social communication that contained positive, negative, and neutral information about the speaker, and positive and negative impressions that the speaker had presumably formed about the subject. Groups differed in their recall of evaluative information about themselves, with moderately dysphoric subjects displaying poorer recall. Groups did not differ in their recall of information about the speaker. Moderately dysphoric subjects also displayed relatively negative appraisals of how they thought the speaker perceived them. The results are discussed as being partially inconsistent with cognitive theories of depression, and paradigmatic differences with prior studies are reviewed.

Illustration of concomitant times series analyses in a case of somatoform disorder

The purpose of this article is to illustrate, for those unfamiliar with the methods, concomitant time series analyses and their utility in psychopathology research. In a case involving somatoform disorder, we offer a detailed illustration of these analytic procedures where hypotheses regarding psychosocial antecedents of somatic symptoms are tested. Also portrayed are methods for describing across-time trends and cycles in longitudinal data. Included is a discussion of other clinical questions amenable to a time series approach, as well as a consideration of practical issues in the design of such studies.

Performance on two cognitive tasks by dysphoric and nondysphoric students

Mildly and moderately dysphoric undergraduates and normal controls participated in two tasks: estimating the percentage of reinforcements they had received on an ambiguous laboratory task and recognition of negative and positive adjectives after a 2-week presentation-test interval. The results indicated that moderately dysphoric subjects responded in a more negative direction than normals on both tasks; however, they displayed “distorted” processing on only one measure (underestimation of reinforcement rate in a low reinforcement condition). In contrast, the nondysphoric group displayed a positive, self-enhancing bias on virtually all the measures. The results are discussed in relation to theories of depression, and with regard to problems in assessing cognitive processes.

Behavioral, Emotional, and Autonomic Reactions To Stress Among Incarcerated, Youthful Offenders

Approximately 200 youthful, male prison inmates underwent a laboratory procedure involving episodes of interpersonal stress. On each stress trial, inmate-subjects indicated their subjective feeling state and communicated a social counterresponse to the provoking experimenter. Four autonomic processes were also measured throughout these procedures. Analyses of these interrelated sources of data suggested that the characteristic inmate reaction pattern could be described as anxious, acquiescent, self-demeaning, and depressive-like; and that behavioral-autonomic data patterns revealed an unusual inverse relationship not ordinarily found in control subjects. The implications of these results for rehabilitation programs are discussed.

Self-evaluations following performance on interpersonal tasks by depressed and nondepressed students

Mildly depressed students and nondepressed controls engaged in a series of interpersonal tasks and rated their own performance after each task. Half of each group worked on the tasks and did the self-rating in a “public” condition (experimenter present), whereas the other half of ech group were in a “private-anonymous” condition (experimenter absent). The results indicated that depressed subjects in the public condition evaluated their performance as significantly lower than depressed subjects in the private condition. The latter groups self-ratings were not significantly different from those of nondepressed subjects. The results were discussed in relation to experimental demand characteristics and depression theory.

EFFECTS OF AUTONOMIC AROUSAL LEVEL, SEX AND FRUSTRATION ON PERFORMANCE

This paper investigates the effects of initial heart rate level (Drive), sex and frustration on symbol-matching performance. Low (LD), moderately low (MLD), moderately high (MHD), and high (HD) heart-rate Ss worked on a modified digit-symbol problem before and after a frustration or no-frustration manipulation which raised heart rate on the average 20.6 and 2.96 beats/minute respectively. The results show that MHD and HD Ss complete significantly more matches initially than LD and MLD Ss by manifesting both shorter response and inter-trial interval latencies. Furthermore, frustration induced autonomic arousal facilitates performance improvement for LD and MLD Ss and decelerates performance improvement for MHD and HD Ss. Frustration-induced arousal exerts this effect by altering response latency only. No sex differences were observed.