The Inevitability of Future Suffering: The Role of Depressive Predictive Certainty in Depression

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that depressed individuals not only make pessimistic predictions about the future, but also do so with considerably more certainty than do nondepressed or mildly depressed individuals. The notion of depressive predictive certainty is introduced as a means of conceptualizing hopelessness, because one should “give up” hope when the occurrence of dreaded events and the nonoccurrence of desired events seem inevitable. Study 1 examined the manner in which a sample of college students made predictions about positive and negative future events that might happen to them. Increasing depression (as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory; BDI) was associated both with depressive pessimism (estimating that negative events are likely and that positive events are not) and with certainty in making these pessimistic predictions. Such certainty was uniquely associated with depression, even when the simple perceived likelihood of the events (and even generalized hopelessness as measured by the Beck scale) was considered. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1, and extended them, by contrasting the role of depressive predictive certainty in depression with the role of depressive attributional style and the recent occurrence of negative life events. Depressive predictive certainty was again reliably and uniquely associated with depression, even when negative life events and attributional style were included in the equation. Importantly, the interaction between attributional style and negative life events was positively associated not only with BDI-assessed depression, but also with depressive predictive certainty, providing suggestive correlational evidence favoring the recent hopelessness-based reformulation of learned helplessness theory. That is, the certainty conceptualization functions as this model suggests hopelessness should, by acting (at least in part) as a mediator of depression. The data are considered in the context of cognitive models of depression.