Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 7-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Emotional Reactivity to Daily Events in Major and Minor Depression

Emotional Reactivity to Daily Events in Major and Minor Depression Although emotional dysfunction is an important aspect of major depressive disorder (MDD), it has rarely been studied in daily life. Peeters, Nicolson, Berkhof, Delespaul, and deVries (2003) observed a surprising mood-brightening effect when individuals with MDD reported greater reactivity to positive events. To better understand this phenomenon, we conducted a multimethod assessment of emotional reactivity to daily life events, obtaining detailed reports of appraisals and event characteristics using the experience-sampling method and the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) in 35 individuals currently experiencing a major depressive episode, 26 in a minor depressive (mD) episode, and 38 never-depressed healthy controls. Relative to healthy controls, both mood-disordered groups reported greater daily negative affect and lower positive affect and reported events as less pleasant, more unpleasant, and more stressful. Importantly, MDD and mD individuals reported greater reductions in negative affect following positive events, an effect that converged across assessment methods and was not explained by differences in prevailing affect, event appraisals, or medications. Implications of this curious mood-brightening effect are discussed. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Abnormal Psychology American Psychological Association

Emotional Reactivity to Daily Events in Major and Minor Depression

Download PDF
13 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/american-psychological-association/emotional-reactivity-to-daily-events-in-major-and-minor-depression-Hck5GVSchQ

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
American Psychological Association
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 American Psychological Association
ISSN
0021-843X
eISSN
1939-1846
DOI
10.1037/a0021662
pmid
21319928
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Although emotional dysfunction is an important aspect of major depressive disorder (MDD), it has rarely been studied in daily life. Peeters, Nicolson, Berkhof, Delespaul, and deVries (2003) observed a surprising mood-brightening effect when individuals with MDD reported greater reactivity to positive events. To better understand this phenomenon, we conducted a multimethod assessment of emotional reactivity to daily life events, obtaining detailed reports of appraisals and event characteristics using the experience-sampling method and the Day Reconstruction Method (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) in 35 individuals currently experiencing a major depressive episode, 26 in a minor depressive (mD) episode, and 38 never-depressed healthy controls. Relative to healthy controls, both mood-disordered groups reported greater daily negative affect and lower positive affect and reported events as less pleasant, more unpleasant, and more stressful. Importantly, MDD and mD individuals reported greater reductions in negative affect following positive events, an effect that converged across assessment methods and was not explained by differences in prevailing affect, event appraisals, or medications. Implications of this curious mood-brightening effect are discussed.

Journal

Journal of Abnormal Psychology – American Psychological Association

Published: Feb 10, 2011

There are no references for this article.