An Experimental Study On The Future Situational Thinking Of Undergraduates With Depression Tendency

Some studies have found that people with depression disorder have negative bias when they imagine future scenarios,which is manifested as the decrease of positive expectation of the future and the increase of negative expectation of the future.However,the current research results are not consistent with whether the decline of future positive expectation and the increase of future negative expectation exist at the same time.Through the experiment of thinking about the future situation of college students with depressive tendency,this study explores whether there is a decrease of future positive expectation and an increase of future negative expectation in college students with depressive tendency.In this study,two experiments were carried out to investigate this problem with different paradigms.In this study,two experiments were carried out to examine it in different paradigms.In the experiment,the subjects were divided into two groups: the depression-prone group(college students with a score greater than or equal to 14 on the beck depression scale(BDI))and the non-depression-prone group(30 with a BDI score less than or equal to 13).Experiment 1 adopts the future imagination task paradigm and requires the subjects to report as many future events that may happen to them as possible within a specified period of time(60s)according to the emotional cues.The results showed that compared with non-depressed college students,depressed college students imagined more future sad events,and depressed college students imagined fewer future happy events,with significant differences.In experiment 2,the possibility evaluation paradigm was used to ask the subjects to evaluate the possibility of the future scenario events presented to them.The results showed that depressed college students were more likely than non-depressed college students to believe that future sad events would happen to them and that future happy events would be less likely to happen to them.The results of the above two experiments show that the phenomenon of increasing negative expectations and decreasing positive expectations also exists in the depressed college students.