ارزیابی فردی از افراد پریشان از نظر عاطفی توسط افراد مضطرب و ملال

Coyne [J. Abnorm. Psychol. 85 (1976a) 186; Psychiatry 29 (1976b) 28] first reported that depressed persons were negatively appraised interpersonally by interaction partners. The purpose of the current study was to replicate previous findings extending Coyne’s theory to anxious individuals and to assess how anxiety and depression of the raters may affect these ratings. Anxious, dysphoric, and control participants watched a video of an actor portraying anxious, depressed, or neutral affect (n=208). Results indicated that the actor portraying depressed affect was assessed more negatively than the actor portraying anxious affect who, in turn, was assessed more negatively than the actor portraying neutral affect. However, anxious and dysphoric participants did not differ from control participants in their ratings of the videos.

According to Coyne’s (1976b) interpersonal model of depression, individuals who interact with a depressed person may experience negative emotions as a result of this interaction. Although these individuals may attempt to compensate with somewhat nongenuine reassurance and support, they may also exhibit rejection toward those displaying symptoms of depression, particularly through avoidance. He further proposed that this pattern of avoidance may serve to further increase depressive symptoms and validate the depressed person’s negative self-view. In the first study testing hypotheses associated with this model, Coyne (1976a) found that individuals who spoke on the telephone with an unfamiliar depressed target1 from an outpatient mental health center did indeed experience more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and hostility than did individuals who interacted with a nondepressed target from the same center. They were also more likely to reject the depressed target than the nondepressed target. These conclusions were confirmed by later studies (e.g., Sacco & Dunn, 1990 and Strack & Coyne, 1983; see Segrin & Dillard, 1992, for a review). Although interpersonal rejection of depressed people has been found to be a robust and reliable effect, some attempts at replication have revealed limits to the range of conditions under which it occurs. For example, in their meta-analysis, Marcus and Nardone (1992) reviewed evidence providing strong support for Coyne’s model when examining long-term relationships, interactions with confederates portraying depressed persons, transcripts, or video and audiotapes of depressed targets. However, interactions with depressed strangers did not consistently elicit rejection and negative mood. Most of the research on interpersonal functioning in depression has failed to examine whether interpersonal dysfunction is specific to depression or whether it is also characteristic of anxiety or a more general type of distress. Many researchers have noted the strong relationship between depression and anxiety (see Clark & Watson, 1991b and Maser & Cloninger, 1990; Mineka, Watson, & Clark, 1998, for reviews), thus increasing the likelihood that negative interpersonal appraisals might well also be found in response to anxious individuals (who are not very depressed) (e.g., Gurtman, Martin, & Hintzman, 1990). This is particularly interesting to examine in light of the elevated anxiety levels present in virtually all depressed individuals (e.g., Mineka et al., 1998). Indeed, in theory it could be the case that anxious symptoms rather than depressive symptoms per se are largely or partly responsible for negative interpersonal appraisals of nominally “depressed” individuals. It is also possible that similar interpersonal styles may lead to negative appraisals of anxious individuals. For example, increases in anxiety symptoms have been found to be related to increases in reassurance seeking (e.g., Joiner, Katz, & Lew, 1999). Reassurance seeking, in turn, has been linked to social rejection and negative appraisals of depressed individuals by others (Joiner, Alfanso, & Metalsky, 1992). The combination of the comorbid symptoms and similar interpersonal styles begs the question of whether interpersonal rejection is actually found in response to anxious individuals. Further, interpersonal rejection is posited to be a maintaining factor of anxiety and avoidance (e.g., Clark & Wells, 1995). Unfortunately, however, only a few studies in the interpersonal area have examined issues regarding social appraisals of persons with anxiety or comorbid depression and anxiety. These studies provided some preliminary evidence that persons with anxiety with or without comorbid depression also experience interpersonal rejection and thus suggest that adverse interpersonal consequences may not be specific to depression (e.g., Gurtman et al., 1990, Meleshko & Alden, 1993 and Papsdorf & Alden, 1998; but see Segrin & Kinney, 1995, for negative results). More research is warranted on this topic because of limitations of previous studies. Because most of these studies assessed social rejection through ratings by one or two independent assessors of the depressed or anxious targets instead of by experimental participants in the study (Meleshko & Alden, 1993, Papsdorf & Alden, 1998 and Segrin & Kinney, 1995), these interpersonal consequences may be subject to the idiosyncrasies of a few raters. Gurtman et al.’s (1990) method assessed how participants rated portrayals of depression, anxiety, and control affect. However, because participants both watched videotaped portrayals and read symptom lists ostensibly endorsed by the confederate/actor it is unclear whether participants rejected the depressed and anxious confederates based on how they seemed on the videotape or based on their symptom lists. Nolan, Mineka, and Gotlib (2003) and Nolan (1998) assessed the interpersonal appraisals of confederates/actors on videotapes portraying anxious, depressed, and neutral affect (without accompanying symptom lists) and found that both the anxious and depressed targets were more harshly appraised and rejected than the neutral targets (total n=385). Nolan et al. also found no differences between the ratings of anxious and depressed confederates despite the study having adequate power to detect a medium sized effect. The researchers cited above examined the interpersonal appraisals of people with anxiety or depression by unselected, ostensibly “normal” individuals (although usually this has not been directly measured). However, conceptually related questions about how depressed individuals evaluate targets with depression have sometimes led to a seemingly different pattern of results (albeit with somewhat different kinds of paradigms). People who are distressed, especially those with low self-esteem, may feel threatened by others who are better off and, as a result, choose to avoid such people and seek out (rather than avoid or reject) others who they perceive to be worse off. The knowledge that others are not faring as well as the distressed person might increase subjective well-being. This process has been explained by social comparison theory, and is referred to as downward comparison (Wills, 1981). Additionally, social comparison researchers have found that people tend to prefer individuals who are similar to themselves (e.g., Byrne, 1971) and this preference for similarity has been extended to similarity of mood and is termed preference for affect similarity. Researchers have also shown that individuals who are depressed often evince an improved mood and a preference for future interactions after learning about or interacting with individuals who are similarly or more depressed than themselves (e.g., Gibbons, 1986; Rook, Pietromonaco, & Lewis, 1994; Rosenblatt & Greenberg, 1991 and Wenzlaff & Prohaska, 1989). However, it should be noted that not all studies that tested for differences in how depressed versus nondepressed individuals responded to people with worse moods found differences in mood or preference for future interactions (e.g., Albright & Henderson, 1995 and Swallow & Kuiper, 1993; see Ahrens & Alloy, 1997, for a review). Similar to the literature on interpersonal appraisals, very few researchers have explicitly looked at whether people with anxiety disorders (or high trait anxiety) prefer (or are less harsh in appraising) other distressed persons. However, there is reason to believe that they might given the high degree of comorbidity and symptom overlap with depression (e.g., Clark, 1989 and Mineka et al., 1998). There has also been at least one study that found that the relationship between social anxiety and being rejected by a rater was lessened if the target was more similar to the rater (Papsdorf & Alden, 1998). Further, Olson and Evans (1999) found that students who were high on neuroticism reported a greater increase in positive affect after engaging in downward comparison than did people who were low on neuroticism. Because elevated levels of neuroticism are found in both anxiety and depression, by extension it seems quite likely that anxious individuals may be similar to depressed individuals being less harsh in appraising other distressed people. The present study was conducted to determine whether the frequently observed negative interpersonal appraisals of depressed individuals also occur with anxious individuals. As the review of the literature illustrates, more research is needed to help clarify the similarity or distinctiveness of interpersonal appraisals of anxious people compared to those of depressed people. Therefore, one goal was to replicate and extend the findings of Nolan et al. (2003) and Nolan (1998) regarding the rejection of anxious and depressed targets, in this case by anxious, dysphoric, and control participants rather than just control participants as in the Nolan et al. studies. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the neutral target would be less negatively appraised than the anxious target and that the depressed target would be equally negatively appraised as the anxious target (or possibly more so). A secondary goal of this study was to determine whether anxious and dysphoric individuals differed from normal controls in their interpersonal appraisals of distressed individuals. Based on the findings that depressed (and perhaps anxious) individuals prefer individuals with similar (or worse) affect, we hypothesized that anxious and dysphoric participants would appraise the anxious and depressed targets less harshly than the control participants. These hypothesized effects might be explained as a result of affect similarity or based on an indirect effect of downward comparison. Because we were interested in assessing differences between reactions to anxious and depressed targets, we decided that it was important to conduct this study with confederates (as opposed to patients) in order to control for the affect portrayed. Previous studies (e.g., Gurtman et al., 1990 and Marks & Hammen, 1982) have found that confederates can elicit the same interpersonal rejection found in studies with depressed people and that these effects occur more consistently when observing confederates than when interacting with strangers (Marcus & Nardone, 1992). Furthermore, using videotapes of one actor portraying the three different types of affect allowed us to control for several other possible confounding variables including the general content of the scenario (failing an exam), physical attractiveness of the target, intrinsic personality characteristics (such as charm and warmth), and self-presentation concerns. One major difficulty in implementing our goals is that it has become increasingly apparent in the past 20 years that anxiety and depression are such overlapping constructs that it is virtually impossible to obtain purely anxious or purely depressed groups because both putative groups are elevated on negative affect (e.g., Clark & Watson, 1991a and Watson & Tellegen, 1985). Moreover, any attempt to create entirely separate anxious and depressed groups would only compromise external validity because a depressed-nonanxious group would not be representative of most depressed individuals in the general population. Thus, we chose to select our anxious and dysphoric groups using a strategy that derives from Clark and Watson’s tripartite model of depression and anxiety and the assessment method that has been developed to test it (Clark & Watson, 1991b and Watson et al., 1995). According to this model, both dysphoric and anxious individuals exhibit symptoms of negative affect (e.g., depressed and anxious mood, insomnia, indecisiveness, irritability, etc.). However, anhedonia and absence of positive affect (e.g., lack of energy and enthusiasm) are relatively specific to depression, whereas somatic tension and anxious arousal (e.g., shortness of breath, dizziness, etc.) are relatively specific to anxiety (or panic). Because the anxious arousal component may not be as applicable to generalized anxiety as it is to panic (Mineka et al., 1998 and Zinbarg & Barlow, 1996), our anxious group was not selected based on the anxious arousal component and is described more accurately as a group with an elevated level of general anxiety and negative affectivity, but without an elevated level of anhedonia (or lack of positive affect).