دو مکانیسم برای کنترل علی و معلولی: استفاده و در دسترس بودن اطلاعات در محیط در افراد با و بدون نشانه هایی از افسردگی

Perceiving one's causal control is important for adaptive behavior. Studying depression and other individual differences has provided insight into typical as well as pathological causal processing. We set out to study factors that have been shown to distinguish those with and without signs of depression and affect perceptions of causal control: levels of behavior, the availability of outcomes and learning about the environment or context. Two experiments were carried out in which participants, scoring low and high on the Beck Depression Inventory using established cutoffs, completed a causal control task, in which outcomes occurred with a low (.25) or high probability (.75). Behavior levels were either constrained (N1 = 73) or unconstrained (N2 = 74). Overall, findings showed that levels of behavior influenced people's experiences of the context in which events occurred. For all participants, very high behavior levels eliminated sensitivity to levels of outcomes occurring in the environment and lead to judgments that were consistent with conditional probabilities as opposed to the experimenter programmed contingency. Thus increased behavior increased perceived control via influence on context experience. This effect was also evident for those scoring high on the BDI. Overall conclusions are that behavior and context provide two important interlinked psychological pathways to perceived control. However, situations that constrain people's ability to respond freely can prevent people with signs of depression from taking control of a situation that would otherwise be uncontrollable.

Perception of control over actions and their consequences is a hallmark of adaptive behavior and good mental health (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Studies have shown that people in general can discriminate between experimentally controlled situations in which they do and do not have control over events (Allan and Jenkins, 1983 and Dickinson et al., 1984). In addition, comparisons between distinct groups of people based on pre-existing individual differences, such as levels of depression, have been used as a tool to inform our understanding of the psychological processes involved in causal control for people in general (e.g., Msetfi, Murphy, Simpson, & Kornbrot, 2005). This previous work shares the implicit assumption that the participant's causal task is simply to learn the experimenter-presented relation and that they may do so accurately or in a biased fashion (for a detailed background, see Allan, 1993).

In this paper, we set out to study the roles of levels of behavior and the availability of outcomes in the environment, and their interactive effects, on causal control learning in people who scored low and high on a depression scale. Initially, we had identified the moderating effect of context as a key area of ambiguity in control learning, which seems to separate people with and without signs of depression. This was the case in the present study. Key findings are that behavior, via its effect on exposure to the context, provided a powerful pathway to resolve this particular ambiguity, though others remain in relation to the temporal parsing of events. Temporal and behavioral constraints on control learning, as a product of the situation or an individual difference, such as depression, may act as a block to people's ability to enhance their sense of control.