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Decision Justification Theory in Depression: Regret and Self-Blame

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Abstract

Depressed individuals experience more self-blame than healthy individuals. Less is known about how depressed individuals process and display regret. Decision Justification Theory (DJT) proposes two components of decision regret: self-blame for making a bad choice, and comparative evaluation of the outcome. The current study examined DJT in the context of currently, formerly, and never depressed individuals. Sixty-five participants (27 never, 24 formerly, and 14 currently depressed) read two scenarios designed to elicit regret and rated the degree to which they experienced self-blame, comparative evaluation regret, and overall regret. Currently depressed participants demonstrated greater self-blame regret compared to the never depressed group. There were no significant effects of depression status on comparative outcome regret or overall regret. These results suggest that MDD is associated with increased self-blame regret, but not comparative outcome regret. Future research is needed to determine if self-blame is a symptom of MDD or a maintenance factor.

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Notes

  1. Results described here use parametric statistics. However, it should be noted that the regret data were not normally distributed. As such, we also analyzed the results using non-parametric statistics and the results were nearly identical to those using parametric statistics. In particular, a Kruskal–Wallis H Test indicated that there was a significant effect of depression status on self-blame regret within the self-blame scenario (p = .04) and a Mann–Whitney U test indicated that there is a significant difference between the currently depressed and never depressed individuals (p = .036).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, 116 North Murray Hall, Stillwater, OK, 74078, USA

    Morganne A. Kraines, Cassandra P. Krug & Tony T. Wells

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  1. Morganne A. Kraines
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  2. Cassandra P. Krug
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  3. Tony T. Wells
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Morganne A. Kraines.

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Conflict of Interest

Morganne A. Kraines, Cassandra P. Krug, and Tony T. Wells declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Animal Rights

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

Appendix

Appendix

Scenarios

Scenario 1

“Imagine that you are leaving a party where you were drinking alcohol. A friend suggests that you call a cab but you decide to go ahead and drive yourself home.

You arrive home safely, but in the morning you realize that you had been too drunk to drive. You drove through an area of town that usually has many pedestrians and quite a bit of traffic and you realize that things could have ended in disaster.”

Scenario 2

“Imagine that you are deciding whether or not to vaccinate your 1-year-old child against a serious disease.

The disease can have serious negative long term effects on your child’s health and can even end in death. The vaccine is reliable and quite safe. Only 1 out of every 10,000 children given the vaccine have the bad side effect (complete blindness).

You consult doctors, vaccine experts, and friends who all agree you should vaccinate your child. You consider carefully and decide to vaccinate. You are unlucky and your child suffers the side effect of blindness.”

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Kraines, M.A., Krug, C.P. & Wells, T.T. Decision Justification Theory in Depression: Regret and Self-Blame. Cogn Ther Res 41, 556–561 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9836-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9836-y

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