Relationships between Dimensions of Depressive Experience and Evaluative Beliefs about People in General

The present research examined relationships between depression and evaluative beliefs about people in general. Subjects were 111 college students. Depression was assessed with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977) and the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976), which differentiates three dimensions of depression. Subjects rated people in general on 36 evaluative adjectives, and they judged the degree of success people generally achieve in seven basic life domains. Among the females, high Dependency scores were associated with negative evaluations of people. Highly self-critical males evaluated people negatively and perceived them as achieving a low degree of success in life. The results for overall depression seem to obscure the results obtained for specific factors of depression. Implications for depressive inter-personal behavior andfor the notion of a depressive negative bias toward the self are discussed.