Social information processing biases in depressed and nondepressed collegestudents

The depressive realism effect is the paradoxical fact that persons sufferin g from depression sometimes have more accurate perceptions than individuals not experiencing depression. Relatively few previous studies in the depres sive realism literature have attempted to achieve ecological validity throu gh use of complex social stimuli. Depressed and nondepressed college studen ts were given two measures of social information processing accuracy. In a videotape task, participants rated how actors expressing various behaviors in a videotaped interaction felt about each other. In a live interaction ta sk, participants rated how a confederate displaying behaviors similar to th ose portrayed by the videotaped actors felt about them. On both the live an d video tasks, both groups were accurate in identifying schema consistent i nformation, but inaccurate when judging schema inconsistent information. Th e pattern of results supports schema based biases as an explanation for dep ressive realism phenomena and is inconsistent with several other cognitive or motivational hypotheses.