SEVERITY OF DEPRESSION AND RESPONSIVENESS TO ATTRIBUTIONAL INFORMATION

Prior research demonstrating a heightened sensitivity to social information in depressives is based primarily on data from mildly depressed persons who perceive their lives' outcomes to be only moderately uncontrollable. To the extent that severely depressed individuals have more extreme perceptions of uncontrollability, they should be less responsive to social information than mildly depressed persons. To test this hypothesis, nondepressed, mildly depressed, and severely depressed students evaluated an actor who violated or complied with the attributional norm of internality (Weary, Jordan, & Hill, 1985). As predicted, the evaluations of the mildly depressed students showed the greatest responsivity to the attributional information relative to the nondepressed and severely depressed students. Predicted linear relationships between depression, perceived control, and uncertainty also were obtained. The results were consistent with the notion that a curvilinear relationship between depression and sensitivity to attributional information may reflect differences in levels of heightened contingency uncertainty and perceptions of uncontrollability.