Bad Roots to Grow: Deficient Implicit Self-Evaluations in Chronic Depression With an Early Onset

Implicit self-esteem, which is based on associative learning processes, is considered to be constituted earlier in life than explicit, verbalized self-esteem. While depressed individuals report negative explicit self-esteem, research has predominantly demonstrated equivalent levels of implicit self-esteem of depressed and healthy individuals. We further illuminate this finding by theorizing and empirically demonstrating that chronically depressed individuals show particularly low levels of implicit self-esteem when depression had an early onset.

We applied measures of implicit (name-letter test) and explicit (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale) self-esteem in chronically depressed patients with an early onset (N = 17), a late onset (N = 13), and an episodic depression (N = 29).

As expected, patients with an early onset showed lower implicit self-esteem than the 2 other groups.

Implicit self-esteem may function as a marker of how deeply negative self-views are internalized. Furthermore, the distinction between early and late onset of chronic depression seems to be valuable for classification and potentially treatment of unipolar depression.