Depressive symptoms and persistent negative self-referent thinking among adolescents: A learning account

Learning theories of depression propose that negative thinking is acquired through subsequent rewarding experiences and is often resistant to change even when it becomes associated with punishment. We examined whether this persistency of negative thinking is related to current and future levels of depressive symptoms among adolescents. Persistency of negative self-referent thinking was assessed by means of a decision-making task, namely the emotional reversal learning task. This task offers participants the choice between thinking about negative and positive self-related aspects. Their choice for negative self-referent thinking is initially rewarded but is later punished. Therefore, participants were expected to efficiently switch between negative and positive self-referent thinking, and to internally update their reward expectancy for these thinking options. Results showed that persistency of negative self-referent thinking was related to concurrent levels of depressive symptoms, replicating earlier findings in adults. However, persistency of negative thinking was unrelated to future levels of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that adolescents with depressive symptoms tend to hold on to the belief that negative self-referent thinking has beneficial consequences, even when it is no longer being rewarded. This tendency should be seen as a concurrent feature of depression, as the predictive value is still in question.