From writing tasks to a public service announcement: Experimentally assessing savoring as a means of increasing help-seeking for depression

Prior studies that used positive emotion infusions (PEIs) to increase help-seeking for depression found initial support for the approach (Siegel & Thomson, 2016; Straszewski & Siegel, 2018, 2020). However, as people with depression experience negative biases that may be maximized when self-relevance is high (Clark et al., 1999), a potential way to maximize the effect of the PEI approach may be to reduce self-focus.

We used two preregistered studies (US; 2/19/19 to 9/25/19) to identify the strongest version of a savoring writing task for the current context (Study 1) and test it in the form of a savoring-public service announcement (Study 2; S-PSA).

Study 1 (N = 1308) compared five savoring writing tasks that varied in self-focus to a control writing task: vicarious, self-distanced, relational, combination, and personal savoring. Study 2 (N = 1238) compared a relational S-PSA to a comparison PSA and a basic control video on help-seeking attitudes, intentions, and behavior.

In Study 1, relational savoring was associated with greater help-seeking intentions than the combination savoring condition among all participants and greater help-seeking intentions than the control among participants who self-reported paying full attention during the study. In Study 2, the S-PSA did not perform better than the comparison PSA or basic control video on the outcome measures.

The present research highlights three important takeaways. 1) Researchers should continue to explore relational savoring as an approach to increase help-seeking for depression. 2) Similar to findings of prior depression help-seeking studies, crowdsourcing platforms may be useful for testing informational videos but less appropriate for testing videos that require deep levels of thinking for people experiencing heightened depressive symptomatology. 3) From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, these studies underscore the value of conceptual replications using multiple methods.