ARE DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS POSITIVELY OR NEGATIVELY ASSOCIATED WITH THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL?

Interactions between attributions and beliefs at trial-by-trial level: Evidence from a novel computer game task

Inferring causes of the good and bad events that we experience is part of the process of building models of our own capabilities and of the world around us. Making such inferences can be difficult because of complex reciprocal relationships between attributions of the causes of particular events, and beliefs about the capabilities and skills that influence our role in bringing them about. Abnormal causal attributions have long been studied in connection with psychiatric disorders, notably depression and paranoia; however, the mechanisms behind attributional inferences and the way they can go awry are not fully understood. We administered a novel, challenging, game of skill to a substantial population of healthy online participants, and collected trial-by-trial time series of both their beliefs about skill and attributions about the causes of the success and failure of real experienced outcomes. We found reciprocal relationships that provide empirical confirmation of the attribution-self representation cycle theory. This highlights the dynamic nature of the processes involved in attribution, and validates a framework for developing and testing computational accounts of attribution-belief interactions.

As part of interpreting our experiences, we spontaneously make causal attributions and use them to update our beliefs about the world, ourselves and others. This has long been a topic of interest, particularly within psychiatry. Some theories assume that people have stable “attributional styles”, others focus on the changing nature of attribution-making and on the relationships between attributions and one’s beliefs about the self, suggesting that the two are mutually connected. In this area of research, people have traditionally been asked to imagine themselves experiencing various significant life events and report on how they would interpret those, or have been exposed to artificial and highly simplified situations in the lab. In this work, we introduce a new task to study relationships between causal attributions and beliefs: repeatedly playing an engaging and relatively complex game of skill. We show that we can detect mutual influences between attributions and beliefs at the level of individual wins and losses. This has implications for how everyday successes and failures impact our beliefs about ourselves and our well-being. It also could help understand how our interpretations of negative experiences can spiral out of control, affecting our mental health.

Illusions of control without delusions of grandeur

We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence - so-called 'illusions of control'. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases could instead arise if we are highly sensitive to action-outcome correlations, but attribute agency when such correlations emerge simply by chance. We motion-tracked participants while they made agency judgements about a cursor that could be yoked to their actions or follow an independent trajectory. A combination of signal detection analysis, reverse correlation methods and computational modelling indeed demonstrated that 'illusions' of control could emerge solely from sensitivity to spurious action-outcome correlations. Counterintuitively, this suggests that illusions of control could arise because agents have excellent insight into the relationships between actions and outcomes in a world where causal relationships are not perfectly deterministic.

Illusion of control: the role of personal involvement

The illusion of control consists of overestimating the influence that our behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. Available evidence suggests that an important factor in development of this illusion is the personal involvement of participants who are trying to obtain the outcome. The dominant view assumes that this is due to social motivations and self-esteem protection. We propose that this may be due to a bias in contingency detection which occurs when the probability of the action (i.e., of the potential cause) is high. Indeed, personal involvement might have been often confounded with the probability of acting, as participants who are more involved tend to act more frequently than those for whom the outcome is irrelevant and therefore become mere observers. We tested these two variables separately. In two experiments, the outcome was always uncontrollable and we used a yoked design in which the participants of one condition were actively involved in obtaining it and the participants in the other condition observed the adventitious cause-effect pairs. The results support the latter approach: Those acting more often to obtain the outcome developed stronger illusions, and so did their yoked counterparts.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients have a reduced sense of control on the illusion of control task

There is disagreement regarding the role of perceived control in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). The present study used a traditional illusion of control paradigm (Alloy and Abramson, 1979) to empirically test control estimation in OCD. Twenty-six OCD patients and 26 matched comparison subjects completed an illusion of control task wherein their goal was to attempt to exert control over a light bulb. The density of reinforcement (high, low) and the valence of trials (gain, loss) were experimentally manipulated within subjects. Unbeknownst to participants, the illumination of the light bulb was predetermined and irrespective of their behavior. OCD patients exhibited lower estimates of control compared with healthy comparison subjects. There were no interactions between group and outcome density or group and valence. We found that OCD patients endorse lower estimates of control than comparison subjects. This finding highlights a potential role for contingency learning in the disorder.

Emotional recognition in depressed epilepsy patients

The current study examined the relationship between emotional recognition and depression using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Second Edition (MMPI-2), in a population with epilepsy. Participants were a mixture of surgical candidates in addition to those receiving neuropsychological testing as part of a comprehensive evaluation. Results suggested that patients with epilepsy reporting increased levels of depression (Scale D) performed better than those patients reporting low levels of depression on an index of simple facial recognition, and depression was associated with poor prosody discrimination. Further, it is notable that more than half of the present sample had significantly elevated Scale D scores. The potential effects of a mood-congruent bias and implications for social functioning in depressed patients with epilepsy are discussed.

The sad truth about depressive realism

In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are non-depressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high--the "outcome-density effect". In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed "depressive realism", and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as "sadder but wiser". We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.

Depressive realism: evidence from false interpersonal perception

The present study examined the depressive realism hypothesis, which posits that depressed people are often more accurate in their perceptions and judgments than non-depressed people are. Each subject initially generated descriptions of others important to them, both positive and negative important others, in the pretest section, and 3 or 4 weeks later, some subjects were invited into the formal experiment to measure the accuracy of their perceptions in a pseudo-social interaction situation. A total of 52 patients diagnosed with clinical depression and 62 normal matched subjects participated in the experimental procedure. The results indicate that clinically depressed patients provided more accurate, less distorted descriptions of their positive important others than did those in the normal group. However, when information involved the negative important others, the results exhibited a trend, but these results did not provide significant support for the depressive realism hypothesis. The results support the depressive realism hypothesis when tasks involve subjects' own positive important others.