EFFECTS OF MONITORING POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EVENTS ON MEASURES OF DEPRESSION

his study examined psychoanalytic, physiological, and social learning models of depression in terms of etiology and symptomatology. Emphasis was placed on social learning theories of depression. First, Beck's cognitive approach stated that the root of depression was a negative cognitive set. Depressive episodes might be externally precipitated, but it was the individual's perception and appraisal of the event that rendered it depression inducing. Secondly, Seligman's learned helplessness model explained reactive depression in terms of a belief in one's own helplessness. Specifically, Seligman stated belief in the uncontrollability of outcomes resulted in depression, irrespective of the correspondence of such beliefs to object circumstances. Additionally, depression resulted from noncontingent aversive stimulation and noncontingent positive reinforcement. Thirdly, Lewinsohn's model was based on these assumptions: a low rate of response-contingent positive reinforcement which acted as an eliciting stimulus for depressive behaviors. This low rate of response-contingent positive reinforcement constituted an explanation for the low rate of behaviors observed in the depressive. Total amount of response-contingent positive reinforcement is a function of a number of events reinforcing for the individual, availability of reinforcement in the environment, and social skills of the individual that are necessary to elicit reinforcement.;These approaches, while describing the topographies of depressed responding, did not deal with controlling variables that were empirically manipulable. These models maintained that the depressed person suffered from distorted cognitions which caused him to view the world negatively. Skinner's analysis of emotional behavior recognized two events--the emotional behavior and the manipulable conditions of which that behavior was a function--as comprising the proper subject matter of the study of emotion. In a Skinnerian analysis, Glenn and Whaley (1977) analyzed depression as being composed of two events: an internal stimulus configuration and the labelling of those events. The occurrence of the labelling behavior under control of this internal stimulus configuration was the "experience" of depression.;In line with Glenn and Whaley's analysis, the present study was designed to bias peoples' responses in one direction or another to see if this response bias had an effect on peoples' moods over time. If nondepressed persons could produce changed profiles on state and mood measures of depression after bringing their verbal behavior under control of labelling external environmental events, the functional analysis of depression might be enlarged to include selective monitoring of external events as a possible etiology for depression in the normal population.;Independent variables were instructions given to three groups of subjects to record daily all negative, positive or total events that occurred over a 3-week period. Pre and postexperimental scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and the Depression Adjective Checklist comprised the dependent variables. The 27 subjects in the negative events group, 30 subjects in the positive events group, and 22 subjects in the total events group completed a demographic data sheet and a postexperimental questionnaire in addition to the Beck and Depression Adjective Checklist. Subjects were paid...