Depression: A Failure to Suppress the Self-Conscious ‘Monitoring’ of Dismal Cognitions

Abstract

In the current research, when normal subjects briefly perceived a word that was death-related, they were less likely to express any self-awareness that they were perceiving a meaningful word. Moreover, when they subsequently remembered such a death word, they were more likely to confuse it with a mentally imaged word. In contrast, when mildly depressed subjects briefly perceived a death-related word, they failed to attentuate their self-awareness that they were perceiving, and subsequently, they failed to mistake the death-related word for a previously imaged word. These results suggest that normal people successfully ‘repress’ the grim realities of death, whereas depressed people fail to suppress the self-conscious ‘monitoring’ of such dismal realities.