When good things don’t register

A recent experiment at Ohio State, described in this story from Science Daily, looked at how depressed and nondepressed people view positive and negative things in their environment. To examine how people form positive or negative attitudes, researchers used a computer game that neatly sidesteps any possible confusion from pre-existing attitudes about particular topics. The game introduces players to a variety of beans with different appearances. They can accept or reject each bean as it appears on the screen; some beans are good beans, adding points to a player’s score, while others are bad beans, resulting in points being lost. The goodness or badness of a bean is reliably indicated by its appearance, and players have to learn to identify beans based on their experience with the game.

In this particular experiment with the bean game, depressed and nondepressed people were equally good at identifying the bad beans. However, depressed people didn’t do as well as the non-depressed at identifying the good beans. This seems to me to present an interesting chicken-and-egg question: Are people slower to spot the good things because they are depressed, or are they depressed because they’re slower to spot the good things? (I suspect the answer might be “Yes”; i.e., both are true.) The Science Daily article seems to come down on the latter side; it concludes by suggesting that therapists who are treating depressed people might try to make them more aware of the good things in their lives. This is probably excellent advice, but I think there’s more to it than that.

It seems to me—based only on my own experiences with depression—that maybe the crucial missing piece in a depressed person’s experience of the game is that to a depressed person, good things don’t reliably feel good. The word “anhedonia” describes the lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable activities that forms, for me, the core experience of depression, and I think it may be what’s at work in the depressed people’s poorer performance in recognizing the good beans. They just don’t always feel whatever it is that identifies experiences as being positive, pleasurable, or worthwhile. Reminding myself of the many blessings in my life is always a good thing to do, but sometimes it seems like an intellectual exercise that doesn’t really do much to bring back the normal feeling of enjoying those blessings. I wish I knew better what it is that brings that feeling of enjoyment back, or makes it go away, but I’d bet that its absence is at the heart of the difference in performance on the bean game.

The paper is Attitude Formation in Depression: Evidence for Deficits in Forming Positive Attitudes, by Laren R. Conklin, Daniel R. Strunk, and Russell H. Fazio (Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 40(1) 120—126, 2009).