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Implicit Motives, Explicit Motives, and Motive-Related Life Events in Clinical Depression

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Abstract

Past research suggests that implicit motive dispositions moderate individuals’ affective responses to stimuli and life events and are related to well-being and symptoms of depression. We examined whether this association also extends to clinical depression by comparing patients diagnosed with a depressive disorder (n = 30) with a control group of surgery patients (n = 31) on implicit motives, assessed with a picture-story exercise, explicit motives, assessed via questionnaire, and recall and affect ratings of motive-related positive and negative life events. Depressed patients had lower levels of implicit needs for achievement and power than controls. Differences for implicit affiliation motivation as well as for the corresponding explicit motives were in the same direction, but considerably smaller. Compared to controls, depressed individuals recalled more positive and negative life events, but only rated the latter (particularly in the domains of power and achievement) more negatively. These findings suggest that implicit motive concepts and measures may provide a fruitful approach to understanding depression.

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Notes

  1. We do not include in our review of previous research on implicit motives and depressive symptoms studies that have used so-called grid measures of motivation, that is, measures that require the respondent to endorse self-report items in response to specific picture cues and that are similar to the explicit motive measure used in the present study (e.g., Fuhr et al. 2014). Although some have claimed that such self-report measures assess implicit motives (e.g., Kehr 2004), there is actually no evidence for convergent validity with well-validated picture-story measures of implicit motives (e.g., Brunstein and Heckhausen 2008; Schüler et al. 2013; Schultheiss et al. 2009; see also our results section), but substantial evidence for convergence with other explicit motive measures (e.g., Kehr 2004; Langens et al. 2005; Schultheiss et al. 2009). Including studies based on grid measures in our review would therefore provide a misleading picture of what is known about the association between implicit motives and depressive symptoms.

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Acknowledgments

The results presented in this paper are based on the first author’s master’s thesis. The data reported in this paper have not previously been presented. We thank Christina Adelhardt for her help in coding PSEs.

Conflict of Interest

Marie-Luise Neumann and Oliver C. Schultheiss declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this article.

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  1. Klinikum Chemnitz gGmbH, Chemnitz, Germany

    Marie-Luise Neumann

  2. Department of Psychology, Friedrich-Alexander University, Nägelsbachstrasse 49b, 91052, Erlangen, Germany

    Oliver C. Schultheiss

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  1. Marie-Luise Neumann
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  2. Oliver C. Schultheiss
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Correspondence to Oliver C. Schultheiss.

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Neumann, ML., Schultheiss, O.C. Implicit Motives, Explicit Motives, and Motive-Related Life Events in Clinical Depression. Cogn Ther Res 39, 89–99 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-014-9642-8

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