CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,692Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive ProcessesDecision-Making and Behavioral EconomicsNeural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 134 of the 134 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser?

Alloy, Lauren B., Abramson, Lyn Y.·1979·Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
DOI 10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were present with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441

Cites

134 of 134 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 134 references

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 101–200 of 1,003

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y.
Affiliations
Northwestern University (US)
ORCID
Alloy, Lauren B.
Venue
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Publisher
American Psychological Association (APA)
Published
1979
Volume
108
Issue
4
Pages
441-485
ISSN
  • 0096-3445 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-2222
DOI
10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441
OpenAlex
W2022640694
Cited by
1,692
References
134
Citations by year
2026: 23 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 53 · 2022: 56 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 75 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 53 · 2017: 39 · 2016: 56 · 2015: 43 · 2014: 45 · 2013: 70 · 2012: 53
FWCI
24.91
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Journal of Experimental Psychology General (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
Keywords
contingency judgment, depression, learned helplessness, conditional probability, self-serving bias, motivational bias, cognitive illusions, contingency learning
MeSH terms
Association Learning, Depression, Female, Humans, Judgment, Learning, Male, Motivation, Proactive Inhibition, Problem Solving

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review