Stuttering Thoughts: Negative Self-Referent Thinking Is Less Sensitive to Aversive Outcomes in People with Higher Levels of Depressive Symptoms

Frontiers in Psychology

Yudai Iijima¹ 

关键词: self-reference;    depression;    reinforcement learning;    Q-learning model;    rumination;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01333

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Learning theories of depression have proposed that depressive cognitions, such as negative thoughts with reference to oneself, can develop through a reinforcement learning mechanism. This negative self-reference is considered to be positively reinforced by rewarding experiences such as genuine support from others after negative self-disclosure, and negatively reinforced by avoidance of potential aversive situations. The learning account additionally predicts that negative self-reference would be maintained by an inability to adjust one’s behavior when negative self-reference no longer leads to such reward. To test this prediction, we designed an adapted version of the reversal-learning task. In this task, participants were reinforced to choose and engage in either negative or positive self-reference by probabilistic economic reward and punishment. Although participants were initially trained to choose negative self-reference, the stimulus-reward contingencies were reversed to prompt a shift toward positive self-reference (Study 1) and a further shift toward negative self-reference (Study 2). Model-based computational analyses showed that depressive symptoms were associated with a low learning rate of negative self-reference, indicating a high level of reward expectancy for negative self-reference even after the contingency reversal. Furthermore, the difficulty in updating outcome predictions of negative self-reference was significantly associated with the extent to which one possesses negative self-images. These results suggest that difficulty in adjusting action-outcome estimates for negative self-reference increases the chance to be faced with negative aspects of self, which may result in depressive symptoms.

【 授权许可】

CC BY