Finally, even when depressed subjects were explicitly trained to reappraise situations in more positive ways, they chose not to use the strategy as often as healthy controls. In a second similar study, subjects chose music, and again depressed subjects chose to listen to sad tunes more often than healthy controls did, even when upbeat music was available. So all the subjects were using the same stimuli selection strategy, but the depressed subjects still chose significantly more of the sad images-even though they clearly had the option of avoiding them. In one, for example, they asked depressed and healthy subjects to choose between looking at sad pictures or amusing ones (or neutral ones). Tamir and her colleagues tested this provocative idea is a few experiments. This raises the possibility that depressed people are actually more motivated to experience unpleasant emotions like sadness, as strange as this sounds. That is, depressed people may be effective enough in regulating their emotions, but they may be choosing to regulate in a direction that reinforces their negative mood. It may instead be that depressed people are choosing the wrong emotion regulation goal to begin with. There is some evidence that depressed people use maladaptive strategies, but Tamir thinks that focusing on the effectiveness of emotional regulation may be missing the point. Rumination, very common in depression, is an example of a maladaptive regulation strategy. Situation selection is another-choosing positive stimuli like movies and music. For example, cognitive reappraisal is a healthy strategy for most people, one that involves rethinking and changing the meaning of situations so that they generate different emotions. Some strategies are adaptive and others not. The distinction between strategies and goals is crucial. Specifically, we’ve been assuming that depression is linked to deficits in regulation strategies, when in fact the problem may have to do with regulation goals. It’s well known and not all that surprising that depressed people have difficulty with emotion regulation, but Tamir believes that we have been looking at emotion dysregulation the wrong way.
Hebrew University psychological scientist Maya Tamir and her colleagues have been studying how people with depression regulate their emotions, and they may have an explanation for my acquaintance’s paradoxical and forlorn lifestyle choices.Įmotional regulation is the process of changing one’s current emotions into more desirable ones.
This seems like an ungenerous thought, I know, but it turns out there may be some truth to it. It was almost like he was choosing sadness. I knew that he suffered from a debilitating disease, but he also didn’t seem to be taking simple steps that might lift his mood. I cared for this man, and I was perplexed by this. He also lived what seemed to me a melancholy life, listening to sad, sentimental music, reading dreary existential novels, and rarely venturing out of his dark and gloomy house. I knew a man some years ago who suffered from serious and chronic depression.
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