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The study wasn’t there to have participants judge whether the scenario was “depressing” or not, it was to evaluate the participant’s ability to accurately asses

The study wasn’t there to have participants judge whether the scenario was “depressing” or not, it was to evaluate the participant’s ability to accurately assess how much objective control over a light they had. This implies that depressed individuals in the study also had to accurately judge when the lights were directly correlated with the button press, and were actually under the control of the depressed participant (so what could be considered a “non-depressing” scenario by some). That’s not to say that negative delusion doesn’t affect people with depression, but the article does lean closer to the theory that most of the fringe observations attributed to a negative outlook may in fact be closer to reality than a normal individuals.

zzzeek 7y ago
you can't observe solely that depressed individuals are more thoughtful or methodical when approached with a technical puzzle, and then jump to the headline, "Depressed People See the World More Realistically". It's like saying people who are very good at chess, video games, or engineering see the world more realistically. What does "more realistically" mean? What kind of "things" are we referring towards, how a bridge is built, if a certain person is a good person or not, what kind of politicians should be elected, if their artistic creations are worthwhile, is this plane is going to crash, is this current situation not so bad or not ? It's ridiculous to make such a sweeping statement, and especially regarding depressives, who almost by definition have a distorted view of reality.