Self-focusing situations and depression.
The author examined the situations in which people turn their attention to the self and investigated differences between depressed and nondepressed persons in self-focusing situations. He developed a Self-Focusing Situation List containing 58 items and administered the list to 436 Japanese undergraduates. He also administered a depression scale to part of the sample (n = 365). A factor analysis extracted 6 factors, and cluster analyses of these 6 factors scores yielded 5 clusters. The participants who preferred self-focusing when alone and avoided self-focusing after positive events (Cluster 5) scored higher on the depression scale than did the participants in Clusters 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Sakamoto
S
S
Department of Sociocultural Environmental Research, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Chiba, Japan. shinji.sakamoto@otsuma.ac.jp
D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology*; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male