Depression and Personal Goals: Cognitive and Emotional Anticipation, 2020-2021

Anderson, Rachel J and Dewhurst, Stephen A and Riggs, Kevin J (2022). Depression and Personal Goals: Cognitive and Emotional Anticipation, 2020-2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855844

Depression is a debilitating condition that causes immense psychological distress to those who experience it. Depression also has profoundly negative effects on many other aspects of everyday living, including physical health, educational attainment, and employment status. Understanding the causes of depression and developing interventions to treat it will, therefore, have significant benefits both for individuals and for society. Previous research has shown that depression is associated with a negative thinking style, whereby individuals hold negative views about themselves, the world, and the future. Recent research has indicated that holding negative views about the future is one of the main factors in causing and maintaining depressive episodes. The research we propose builds on our previous findings that views about the future can be made less negative by an intervention we have termed "Positive Simulation Training". In our previous research, participants were presented with a range of potential life events, 15 positive (e.g., people will admire you) and 15 negative (e.g., someone close to you will reject you). For each event, participants predicted how likely it was to occur in the future, how much control they thought they had over it, and how important it would be to them. They then took part in the Positive Simulation Training task in which they were instructed to mentally simulate a series of positive future events as vividly as possible in response to cue words/phrases that appeared on a computer screen. A control group took part in a neutral visualisation task in which they were instructed to imagine neutral scenes (e.g. the layout of their local shopping centre) as vividly as possible. Participants were then presented with a second set of potential life events and asked to rate them for likelihood of occurrence, control, and importance. We found that Positive Simulation Training led to improvements in participants' expectations about the future events, compared to the neutral visualisation task. Positive future events were rated as more likely to occur and negative events less likely, and individuals rated themselves as having more control over both positive and negative future events. These effects were observed in both depressed and non-depressed individuals. We now wish to build on these preliminary findings and establish whether Positive Simulation Training can be used to treat other negative future biases that have been observed in depression. The questions we plan to address include the following: 1. Can Positive Simulation Training lead to more positive views about future events that are personally important to the participants? 2. Can Positive Simulation Training lead to more positive views about how future events will make one feel? 3. Can Positive Simulation Training enhance beliefs about the likelihood of achieving personal goals? 4. Can Positive Simulation Training improve implicit (unconscious) beliefs about the likelihood of future events? This is important because it has been shown that implicit beliefs have a powerful effect on behaviour. 5. Can Positive Simulation Training enhance more general feelings of optimism about the future? Our eventual aim is to develop an intervention based on Positive Simulation Training that will support recovery from depression by reducing the effects of negative thoughts about the future.

Data description (abstract)

In order to plan, prepare for, and shape events in line with one’s goals, one needs to be able to anticipate future events and/or states. This study investigated the cognitive representations and emotional anticipation pertaining to goal achievement and whether these differ as a function of severity of depressive symptoms. After listing approach and avoidance goals, participants made predictions about these goals (e.g. likelihood of achievement, controllability) and rated their cognitive representations of goal success (vividness, perspective). They also provided ratings of either anticipated (predicted emotions that would accompany goal success) or anticipatory (in-the-moment emotions when imagining goal success) positive emotions. The findings have implications for both future work regarding both anticipated and anticipatory emotions as well as therapeutic techniques to aid depression and dysphoria.

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