DO CONFIDANTS OF DEPRESSED WOMEN PROVIDE LESS SOCIAL SUPPORT THAN CONFIDANTS OF NONDEPRESSED WOMEN

The prediction was tested that during a simulated telephone conversation, the confidants of depressed women would provide less social support than the confidants of nondepressed psychiatric and nonpsychiatric control women. The coded speech of subjects and their confidants indicated that (a) confidants echoed the positive or negative valence of the statements made by subjects; (b) depressed women exhibited more depressotypic speech than women in both control groups; (c) confidants of depressed women also made more depressotypic statements, possibly due to the echoing phenomenon; (d) contrary to prediction, there were no significant group differences in the sequential dependencies of responses that confidants made to depressotypic or antidepressotypic subject statements; (e) contrary to prediction, the affect of depressed women's confidants was not more negative.