Decision making in depression: differences in decisional conflict between healthy and depressed individuals.
This study investigated differences in the emergence of decisional conflict in healthy and depressed participants. The two groups of interest were questioned about their experience of decisional conflict and ongoing thoughts and impressions during decision making. As predicted, depressed participants experienced more decisional conflict than healthy participants. Furthermore, the diverse processes hypothesis was supported: In healthy participants, preoccupation with the task was the only predictor of decisional conflict. In depressed participants, decisional conflict was predicted by a combination of depression-related processes (e.g., low self-efficacy, lack of concentration, rumination, etc.). This research reduces the gap between the relevance of the symptom of indecisiveness (e.g., for diagnostic purposes) and the lack of knowledge in this realm of psychopathology.
van Randenborgh
Annette
A
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany. avanran@gmail.com
de Jong-Meyer
Renate
R
Hüffmeier
Joachim
J
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003657:Decision Making; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011594:Psychometrics; D012016:Reference Values; D020377:Self Efficacy