The present study was designed to examine the social responses of depressives and normals, while they were interacting with one of three personality styles. Trained confederates enacted a critical-competitive (a domineering, aggressive person), a supportive-cooperative (a warm, friendly person), or a helpless-dependent (a needy, helpless person) interpersonal style. The two groups (depressives and normals) interacted with the confederate role players over a series of face-to-face encounters, which were tape-recorded for later content analysis. Subjects also had several opportunities to exchange written communications. The subjects were led to believe that they were participating in an experiment which measured interpersonal aspects of the creative process. The results indicated that relative to normals, depressives sent more written communications of self devaluation-sadness and helplessness to confederates regardless of the type of personality style enacted. In addition, when interacting with all three roles, depressives emitted a lower percentage of neutral talk and more conversational responses which conveyed negative content. However, only when interacting with the critical-competitive personality did depressives send elevated written messages of extrapunitiveness; and these written expressions of anger were not accompanied by direct expressions of hostility when depressives conversed with the critical-competitive personality in face-to-face interactions. While conversing with the helpless-dependent personality, depressives showed a strikingly high percentage of negative self-statements which served to underscore their characteristic written messages of helplessness-sadness. Thus, the helpless-dependent personality prompted exaggerated displays of depressive symptomatology. These findings were discussed in terms of a social-interactional framework for depression. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-01, Section: B, page: 0363. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74404 |
| Contributors | BLUMBERG, STEPHEN RONALD., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 91 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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