{"id":4198,"date":"2011-05-05T07:52:58","date_gmt":"2011-05-05T11:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4198"},"modified":"2011-05-05T07:52:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-05T11:52:58","slug":"morning-read-clarkson-prof-says-depression-has-upside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/05\/05\/morning-read-clarkson-prof-says-depression-has-upside\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning Read: Clarkson prof says depression has upside"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another non-conventional Morning Read today.\u00a0 This morning we point to a paper co-written by Clarkson University psychology professor Andreas Wilke in Potsdam.<\/p>\n

His research, which will appear in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, concluded that “depressed individuals perform better than their non-depressed peers do in sequential decision tasks.”<\/p>\n

You can read an abstract of the study here<\/a>.\u00a0 And I’m including the full text of Clarkson University’s press release below, so you can get more of the context.<\/p>\n

According to the study, people who were depressed were more thorough and made better choices.<\/p>\n

Past research has suggested that feeling blue might improve your analytical reasoning skills.\u00a0 This study found that even severely depressed people enjoy some advantages over their colleagues.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

So what do you think? Are you sourpusses out there more productive than your chipper colleagues?<\/p>\n

Do you grumble your way through more work — and do a better job — than the thumbs-up guy in the cubicle next door?<\/p>\n

And what if our bosses decided that we will be better employees if we’re miserable?\u00a0 Maybe capitalism works best if we’re all clinically depressed?<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there’s the question of whether the researchers were depressed while conducting their study?\u00a0 If not, can we really trust their<\/em> analytical reasoning skills?<\/p>\n

(See?\u00a0 Never a dull moment here at the In Box.)<\/p>\n

Here’s how Clarkson describes the study:<\/p>\n

Sadness, apathy, preoccupation. These traits come to mind when people think about depression, the world’s most frequently diagnosed mental disorder. Yet, forthcoming research in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology provides evidence that depression has a positive side-effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to a new study by Clarkson University Psychology Professor Andreas K. Wilke, along with Bettina von Helversen (University of Basel, Switzerland), Tim Johnson (Stanford University), Gabriele Schmid (Technische Universit\u00e4t M\u00fcnchen, Germany), and Burghard Klapp (Charit\u00e9 Hospital Berlin, Germany), depressed individuals perform better than their non-depressed peers do in sequential decision tasks.<\/p>\n

In their study, participants — who were healthy, clinically depressed, or recovering from depression — played a computer game in which they could earn money by hiring an applicant in a simulated job search.<\/p>\n

The game assigned each applicant a monetary value and presented applicants one-at-a-time in random order. Experiment participants faced the challenge of determining when to halt search and select the current applicant.<\/p>\n

In addition to resembling everyday decision problems, such as house shopping and dating, the task has a known optimal strategy. As Wilke and his colleagues report, depressed patients approximated this optimal strategy more closely than non-depressed participants did.<\/p>\n

While healthy participants searched through relatively few candidates before selecting an applicant, depressed participants searched more thoroughly and made choices that resulted in higher payoffs.<\/p>\n

This discovery provides the first evidence that clinical depression may carry some benefits. For decades, psychologists have debated whether depression has positive side-effects.<\/p>\n

While researchers have recognized that most symptoms of depression impede cognitive functioning, scholars such as Paul Andrews of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics and Andy Thomson of the University of Virginia have proposed that depression may promote analytical reasoning and persistence — that is, qualities useful in complex tasks.<\/p>\n

Past research provides some evidence in support of this possibility, but it focuses on individuals with low levels of non-clinical depression.<\/p>\n

The forthcoming article by Wilke and his colleagues shows that even severe depression might yield some beneficial side effects. Fully understanding the consequences of depression may help uncover its evolutionary roots and thus opening avenues for treatment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another non-conventional Morning Read today.\u00a0 This morning we point to a paper co-written by Clarkson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}