The relationships between sociotropic and autonomous personality styles and depressive realism in dysphoric and nondysphoric university students

The current study examined the hypothesis that participants' responses to depressive realism tasks are not only a function of mood state, but also a function of sociotropic and autonomous personality style. In the first experiment, university students who scored high or low on a measure of sociotropy and high or low on a measure of dysphoria were exposed to a depressive realism paradigm in which they engaged in dyadic interaction with a friend. Following the interaction, participants' estimates of their performance were compared with the evaluations of their friend. In the second experiment, participants who scored high or low on a measure of autonomy and high or low on dysphoria were exposed to a computerized success/failure task. The results across both experiments did not support the depressive realism hypothesis, in that the participants' degree of realism, distortion and/or bias generally varied as a function of both personality style and mood state in the predicted directions. Implications of these findings for the depressive realism literature are discussed.